Retrograde
by CaitlinJ1021
Summary: Part of "3 Doctors, 9 Companions" series set in the future, Clara & OC Thirteen / Clara and the Doctor's attempts to live a semi-ordinary life in the futuristic Brighton of 2064 are constantly foiled by old friends, new friends, teenage tearaways, and more timey-wimey, spacey-wacey threats than you can count.
1. Brighton Rock - Chapter 1

**AN: Part of the "3 Doctors, 9 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" continuity, set after the three main fics in that chronology, Clara X OC Thirteen, doesn't make sense without having read the other fics first.**

 _Brighton Rock_

 _1_

The sky was only partially overcast, some blots of grey diluting the pale blue and making it a washed-out, pastel shade, spotted with white patches around the noon sun. Crowds of tourists ambled up and down the boardwalk – families, children, youths there for the nightlife – in the half-term heat Brighton was even busier than usual. Between the streetlamps bunting was draped, which alternated between the rainbow flag and the Union Flag, encapsulating most of the city's ideals in a few sun-bleached slivers of fabric dancing in the gentle breeze above countless ice cream vendors. The seaside summer began early there, it was something Clara was eager to experience as a resident, in the perfect temperature outside of the sweltering heat of August in which they had initially arrived nine months ago.

The Doctor picked apart a piece of warm, greasy bacon with her fingers, looking through the window of the café. On occasion she would thumb through the newspaper in front of her, a _Metro_ somebody else had left behind that morning which she had retrieved from a nearby chair when they had arrived. The front page, dated May 30th, 2064, bore news of yet another space expedition. They were five years after the tragic demise of Bowie Base One on Mars, but the advent of lightspeed ships meant that humanity was turning its attention to interplanetary imperialism – and late the previous night another lightspeed ship had left Earth's atmosphere to attempt to reach Europa. She finished her bacon.

"Are you gonna eat that toast?"

Clara glanced up from her tablet at the question; she was trawling through criteria for the previous years' GCSE examinations in order to put together a comprehensive revision guide for the Year 11s when term resumed the following week. She looked at her plate and the slice of toast, cold by now, she had left with old dregs of baked beans and egg yolk spattering them. She smiled and pushed the plate towards the Doctor. The Doctor moved the _Metro_ out of the way.

"Go ahead," Clara said, "It's got real butter, real butter's a bit rich for me, especially on top of the fried bread I had already." She was right about the butter, which tasted so nice it made the fact the toast was cold and somewhat soggy bearable; she always hated wasting food. Clara's attention returned to her tablet as the Doctor began to chew the toast slowly, flipping open the paper. It wasn't nearly as thick as it had once been, though, and printed only the major headlines and the sporting news. The _Metro_ was one of the only newspapers left which ran a physical print anymore.

"I've always liked newspapers," said the Doctor, looking disdainfully at Clara's state-of-the-art tablet.

"Literature adapts."

"Journalism is literature now?"

"It's propaganda."

"It's supposed to be unbiased."

"If you think journalism is unbiased then the propaganda has worked," Clara jibed. The Doctor smiled. "Propaganda's always been considered art – look at Banksy." Now she laughed.

"That's a fair point," she nodded. She agreed with Clara. "You think our Banksy is propaganda?"

"Pfft," Clara scoffed sarcastically, "Bloody liberal pro-gay propaganda, that's what it is." The piece was a canvas piece which had been given to them as a wedding present once upon a time by Banksy, who Clara had managed to befriend after mutually revealing _her_ identity as the famously enigmatic time-travelling poet, C.O. Smith, whose poems appeared typed-up on old paper and wedged inside editions of her favourite books in libraries until some scholar found them. Suffice it to say, she and Banksy had a surprising amount in common, hence the wedding gift they kept in their attic, the enormous canvas gathering dust because they didn't have anywhere to hang it in the living room. _Their_ Banksy, in particular, was a stencil outline of two women standing in the craters of the moon. They were wearing retro astronaut helmets and holding hands; behind them, instead of the US flag which was stuck into the rock surface, the rainbow Pride flag rippled in the low gravity. It was a gift from their most recent wedding.

"What're you reading about in the paper?"

"Just this Europa mission," she said with a sigh, lifting up the _Metro_ to show the front page to Clara; photos of the astronauts, the space craft, a blurry satellite image of Europa itself.

"Which one's Europa?" Clara asked, squinting at the paper.

"The one with the oceans." Clara made no sign of recognition. "We've been. Underwater hotel. You know, it was like a skyscraper, but it went down instead of up? Had those huge ballasts on top to keep it floating? There was that big whale-thing and those weird venomous leeches crawling in through the leaky pipes? One of them bit you and your leg turned green?" As Clara strained her memory Thirteen finished off the leftover toast, and wondered about ordering another slice or two for herself; she didn't know how long their lunch was going to last.

"Oh _yeah_ …" Clara realised eventually, "What do they want to go _there_ for?"

"I guess humans just love things from outer space."

"Things from outer space? Who would lower themselves to that?"

"Personally, I'd have nothing to do with anybody who wasn't from my own planet," she quipped. Clara laughed, smiled, finally turned off the display on her tablet and set it down so that she could finish her tea. The Doctor's brief amusement dissipated. "They won't get there." Clara met her eyes, perplexed.

"Why not?"

"Miscalculating the trajectory of a comet. It's going to hit the hull and take out their solar panels so they won't be able to generate any electricity. They'll die in space."

"Can't you do anything?"

"I have a nasty history when it comes to interfering with human space missions," she sighed, "No. It's a fixed point. I've learned my lesson trying to twist fixed points around." It had been a long time since she had met Clara, and Clara understood perfectly the frequent conflict invoked by fixed points in time. Clara picked up the _Metro_ and folded it the other way along the crease; when she set it back down the Europa mission headline was obscured and all Thirteen could see was a large full-page advertisement for a new-fangled laxative.

"Fixed it," Clara declared.

"You fixed it with poop pills. Good going, Coo."

"I try my best."

"How long are we gonna stay? I'm thinking about getting more toast." Clara lifted the stainless-steel lid on the teapot between them, peering inside.

"I could get a least another cup out of this," she said, "So feel free to get more toast." The Doctor did just that, meandering over to the counter and asking for another plate of toast on brown bread. The server told the Doctor she liked her accent. Clara, eavesdropping, called over, "Her accent's _all mine_."

"She's just jealous of how cool I am," the Doctor assured the waitress knowingly as she returned to their window table, and the girl laughed before retreating back into the kitchen. She said quietly to Clara, "One of these days you're gonna go the whole nine yards and just pee on me to claim your territory."

"Lipstick stains are a far more effective way for one to mark their territory, sweetheart," Clara said knowingly, "And I've covered you in those on numerous occasions. Anyway, isn't that what the rings are for?"

"I thought the rings are to sell on to a shady pawnbroker after your spouse dies in mysterious circumstances?"

"Now _there's_ an idea… but, you know; Pride season is about to start. I can't go killing my same-sex partner right before Pride season, in the gayest city in the entire country," Clara said, "Come next week, I'll be wearing my bi flag stud earrings every single day until the end of August. You can wear those ridiculous rainbow tights."

"I love those tights, and I wear them all year round," Thirteen said, "Just like the rainbow shoelaces I have for my red sneakers."

"We live on Earth now, sweetheart, you have to theme your outfits depending on the seasons."

"I don't think you do, I think that's something you think people do, but nobody actually does it." Clara raised her eyebrows at this.

"You think people don't dress for the weather?"

"I mean, like, put on a coat, sure, but anything else is extreme. Why should you let the climate be your master like that? I'm my own person."

"Is that why you wore those leather trousers that time we went to Ancient Greece? When you got heatstroke and almost fainted?"

"I did not get heatstroke," she snapped, "I was just very hot."

"You mean like what happens when you get heatstroke?"

"No – shut up. I looked great in those pants."

Clara scoffed, "I remember when you peeled them off later that night – you could've got gallons ringing them out. And your feet were all macerated. I told you to wear a dress and some sandals." Thirteen scowled as the waitress returned with two fresh slices of toast for her with delicious hot butter melting into the bread. Her scowl turned into a grateful smile as she thanked the girl. "You made _me_ dress for the period…" Clara muttered.

"That's you. I don't need to dress for the period."

"Why?"

"Because. I'm cooler than you." She took a large bite out of the toast and grinned with her mouth full. Clara shook her head.

While the Doctor gorged herself on toast, one of the universe's most delicious foods hands down, Clara poured herself another cup of tea with what was left in the teapot. Looking through the window at the seafront and the throngs of busy, happy people, she was struck down with an epiphany.

"Let's bunk off."

"What?" Clara laughed, stirring sugar into her tea, "It's half-term, sweetheart. We haven't got anything to bunk off from."

"No, no. You've got your nose buried in that tablet trying to make revision resources and mock exams and predict the GCSE questions – let's spend the day together."

"We're together right now. In fact, I daresay we spend all of our time together."

" _Clara_. You know what I mean. It's our holiday as well. I just wanna be able to have my wife's attention for more than five minutes at a time."

"Hey," said Clara, growing serious, "Don't be like that. I'm worried about the kids, I want them to do their best in these exams, that's all – they're important.

"You need a break, Coo. Come on. Humour me. Just for today."

Clara sipped some of her tea, thinking – but Thirteen knew that her comment about Clara not paying enough attention to her had certainly grated more than she had intended. If the opportunity arose, the Doctor resolved to apologise, but at that moment she merely waited for Clara to answer. "Say, hypothetically, I did decide to humour you – what would this brief holiday involve?"

"I don't know – adventure? Romance? Languorous walks along the beach in the afternoon sun? Buying overpriced ice cream after sneaking through the turnstiles on the Pier? Sonicking a photobooth and taking an embarrassing reel of pictures together pulling stupid faces we'll treasure forever? The possibilities are literally endless, my love."

"Ooh, 'my love', you're breaking out the big guns."

The Doctor winked, "I'm putting the charm on you."

"Laying it on a bit thick."

"Oh, please. I've had you wrapped around my finger from the moment we met."

"Nothing could be further from the truth."

"Whaddaya say, doll?" she asked obnoxiously, leaning on the table towards Clara, "You, me, the open ocean? The blue skies? Let's just cut class and damn it all to hell."

"Why do you always go extra-American every time you want me to do something?"

"Because it works. Because you have a weird 'thing' for what's widely regarded to be one of the most aesthetically displeasing accents on your planet, which is why I've been stuck with it for over forty years."

"Makes you sound like a caricature of yourself," Clara quipped.

"And yet you're even more hot for me than usual."

"I think the warm weather is confusing you – did you put the leather trousers on again?" Clara feigned looking under the table, even though she knew full-well Thirteen was just wearing regular, blue jeans.

"Are you gonna put me out of my misery or what?" she crossed her arms and leant back in the chair, done with her toast. Clara narrowed her eyes.

"Only if you _promise_ that these alleged embarrassing photos are going to be some of _the_ most embarrassing photos we've ever taken."

"Absolutely. I'll moon the camera. Or you could moon it, that would be doubly embarrassing."

"Why would it be more embarrassing if I mooned it compared to you?"

"Because."

"Because what…?"

"Because… you know." Clara scrutinised her. "My butt's cuter."

"What – they'd automatically be more embarrassing because I somehow have an ugly arse?"

"Not ugly. Just ugli _er_. Than mine."

"Well, first of all, screw you, and second of all, _screw you_."

"In the photobooth? It'll be cramped, won't it?"

"Fine! Fine, you win, you're distracting me enough, making me think about your arse when I'm trying to finish my lunch and do my revision resources – how am I going to make a revision resource with you being all… eurgh." She paused for a few moments. "Are you ready to pay? Go find some of this promised ice cream out there in the tourist trap?"

"You betcha. Whatever you like."

"Whatever _you_ like, you mean, begging me for my attention," she grumbled as she took out her phone so that she could pay on it. That was how everything worked in those days, all digital payment. There was a small light in the centre of the table which lit up blue, indicating to the servers that they had paid and not just run out, even though the Doctor did have a penchant to dine and dash. "Right, then," Clara folded up the wafer-thin tablet (another weird thing about the 2060s) and and got to her feet, "Come on, eye candy, let's go for this walk. And maybe, if you're _really_ well-behaved, I might let you touch me up in the photobooth."

"You and I both know it won't take much convincing for that to happen, but like I said, it's cramped."

"I've done someone in a photobooth before," Clara said, holding the café door open for Thirteen and garnering some very judgemental attention of an elderly woman – ironically, the elderly woman was probably the same age as Clara, or even younger. "It was a really bad move, actually, because it started taking pictures-"

"Oh my god."

"You couldn't see my face, though."

"That's something."

"Just hers."

"Well then."

"She was very… _excited_. If you catch my drift."

"I wish I knew nothing about you and your drift."

Clara took her arm as they joined the crowds on the promenade ambling to and fro, then whispered wryly in her ear, "I'm pretty sure I kept those pictures, too."

"Eurgh, you're a pervert." Clara laughed at her.

"I fancy some ice cream, now you've got me all hot and bothered."

"I think you got yourself hot and bothered…"

"The weather's _gorgeous_ though, don't you think?" Clara changed the subject away from her womanising ways.

"This is why I wanted to come out and enjoy it with you. You were so desperate for us to move to Brighton instead of just taking the easy way out and going to anonymous London, and yet we never seem to actually do anything." Clara was steering them towards an ice cream stall next to a set of large concrete steps leading down to the beach. The sand was almost completely obscured beneath the sweating mass of beach-goers, splayed out on towels and deck chairs underneath parasols. It was hard to work out where the beach ended and the sea began since both were swarming with half-term tourists.

"We do lots of things! We have date night, don't we?" Clara said. They did have date night, every Friday, as well as the more tacit but equally important date morning on Sundays.

"I guess. I don't know. Maybe I'm craving a little more spontaneity. Not knowing what's coming in the future makes me feel a little better about not knowing what's happened in the past," she sighed. The day-to-day routines of planet Earth made her memory issues and brain damage feel much more pronounced. She had been assured by Itrux, their 'family doctor', that the injuries were not deteriorating, they were only more noticeable now they were no longer on the TARDIS. "You smell, by the way."

"It's hot – it's not a crime to sweat."

"It is, it's a crime to my nose."

"I'll start smoking in a minute, then you'll see how criminal to your nose I can be." Thirteen grimaced; she did _not_ want to put up with the smell of cigarettes, not on a day like today. They joined the rather long line waiting for ice cream and Clara released the Doctor's arm (which she was glad of, considering the heat.) "I do feel you about the spontaneity thing, though. Deadlines and schedules and rotas… there's a real sense of impending doom about everything."

"The sense of impending doom is humanity's unavoidable, rapid march towards death and the whole species doing everything possible to avoid thinking about it. I only really notice how much like fireflies you are when I'm lurking like this."

"Way to be elitist, sweetheart," Clara said, craning her neck to try and get a look at what flavours of ice cream they had, "What do you want to eat?" The Doctor repressed the urge to make fun of her for being short.

"What are you having?"

"Strawberry. They've got hazelnut."

" _Hazelnut_? Oh my god, I'm literally in love with the idea of hazelnuts. I'll have that and a scoop of mint. There's mint, right?"

"That's the most disparate ice cream palette I've ever heard."

" _Ice cream palette_? Coming from you? You'd cover yours in mayonnaise if they had some," she quipped as they advanced through the queue.

"That's because mayonnaise goes with everything."

"It doesn't. You're crazy. Never speak to me again." As it happened, she didn't have to speak to her, because it was time for them to get their ice cream. But after about a minute the Doctor got tired of not talking to Clara.

"It's very disturbing watching you eat ice cream."

"You don't have to watch me, pervert." They began to walk away down the boardwalk.

"And _you_ don't have to bite it." It had always made the Doctor uneasy watching Clara bite ice cream. "There's something wrong with you."

"That's homophobic."

"Is not."

"It is – biting ice cream is gay culture."

"Biting ice cream is Clara culture I think you mean."

"And Clara's gay."

" _Clara_ is obnoxious, and it also definitely is not gay culture, you just don't want to accept that you're a weirdo. Quite honestly, you oughta be ostracised from society for this 'habit'."

"I'm going to bite it and there's nothing you can do to stop me. If you have a problem with it, I can just go back to my revision resources-"

"No, no, absolutely not," the Doctor grabbed hold of Clara's hand, "You're mine for the day, no escape." As if to undermine that sentiment completely, Clara took another large bite out of the pink ice cream in her hand. "You're gonna get brain freeze."

"Worth it. Just for that disgusted look on your cute face. Anyway, I've got a question for you, Miss Fake History Teacher."

"That's _Mrs_ Fake History Teacher to you, Oswald."

"Why _is_ Brighton so gay?"

"Well," she laced their fingers together properly and walked even closer, "I'm very surprised you don't know. It's actually been this way since the Napoleonic Wars. What with it being by the sea and all, it's a major port town and important for the Royal Navy – and you'll know that the Royal Navy was the most powerful navy in the world at one point. One of the reasons why Napoleon famously _lost_ the Napoleonic Wars, and because invading Russia is stupid.

"Anyway, soldier prostitution was _huge_. It was like, the thing to do, these men in the garrisons would be paying each other for sex. Not that it always went well – Brighton might be famous for its liberalism _now_ , but this is England even _before_ Queen Victoria. The people of Shoreham literally burned an effigy of someone they found out was gay, which is totally whack. _However_ , it's been a beacon for lesbian tourism since the 1870s. Angela Burdett-Coutts – the baroness who was literally the richest woman in England and became a huge philanthropist along with her BFF Charles Dickens – used to go on vacay at the Royal Albion with her 'companion,' AKA 'girlfriend,' Hannah Brown. They'd stay there in Brighton every year, and also in Torquay. They were together for fifty-two years until Hannah died, which is longer than we've been together.

"Nothing major happens after that until Radclyffe Hall-"

"Who I've met," Clara interrupted when she took a break from munching her ice cream. Thirteen was licking hers when she paused in between sentences, or to pepper filler-words into her explanations. "She's moody."

"-yeah, until _she_ starts hanging out in the 1930s. The aforementioned Royal Albion Hotel started holding women-only tea dances, and that was when real gay bars started popping up for the first time. Much longer ago than you thought, I'm sure. In the 30s, whizzing off from London to Brighton for a dirty weekend was like leaving Manhattan and going out to West Egg to party with the millionaires Scott and Zelda love so much. And _then_ World War Two happens, so men and women in the armies and air force and working the factories alike are all moving around. And again, Brighton's on the coast, it's important for the navy, to defend against any prospective German invaders. So many soldiers in one place did the same thing for Brighton that it did for Cisco – bohemian capital of the country. Suddenly there were blackouts and air raids all the time, so the police aren't interested in roughing up whatever compromised homosexuals they can get their piggy hands on – there's, you know, the Nazis to worry about.

"And that was when an often-forgotten dude started making it big. I mean, you know I don't think there's a whole ton of difference between the 'official' governments and organised criminal empires in most cases – like, Tony Blair is a war criminal and Al Capone was _TIME_ 's 1930 man of the year – and it was just after the war that a guy called Archie Speyer started really making waves. A decorated naval midshipman who risked his life to defuse a sea mine while evacuating people from a U-boat attack in the frosty Atlantic ocean in early '44, parked his boat in Brighton's queer utopia and started taking over businesses from small-time, violent gangs. Made the city safer, through crime and a pretty successful London-Brighton gambling ring, and rumour has it he was a 'friend of Dorothy' himself who snuck out here for more than a few dirty weekends.

"But Speyer's only one part of the liberal progress which swept this here beachfront. The evolution just carried on, into the 60s when it finally became the _revolution_. The aesthetic centre for counterculture rebellion, the proverbial poster-boy of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. And of course, London was all that too, this is the decade when Mod started to become an actual thing and you have exports like The Beatles and the second British invasion – not to mention mopeds – but London wasn't a queer, pre-liberal utopia. It just didn't have 'the scene,' while Brighton's like, the Lesbos of Britannia. Only, with guys as well. Obviously, there weren't any guys on Lesbos, it's a dude-free zone."

"I remember it vividly. The pornographic playground of all my wildest fantasies. And there was you, in your leather trousers, melting all over the place."

"Ha, ha."

"This is gonna sound _totally_ lame," Clara began, "But I seriously forget how much stuff you know."

"Well, I read up on my Brighton history about eight months ago and have been waiting for you to ask me about it ever since so that I can sound impressive." Clara stopped walking, still holding her hand, leaning on the top of the sea wall above the beachfront.

"Did you really?"

"As it happens, yes, I did. I don't quite have the retention I used to do, didn't want to fumble any important names. Did it work? Are you impressed?"

"Absolutely I'm impressed. That's really sweet."

" _Hang on_ , was that maybe-? A genuine compliment? Not something loaded, and sarcastic? Who are you and what have you done with my wife? She never says nice things," she joked, grinning, aware that she had ice cream around her mouth.

" _Shut up_ , I do."

"Well, I suppose that I think you're really sweet, too, if we're abandoning the doublespeak thing."

"It does get exhausting." Clara smiled at her but then let go of her hand so that she could lean on top of the sea wall with both arms, still eating her ice cream. "I feel less stressed already, to be honest." Thirteen leant on the wall right next to her, overlooking the beach and the sea with the noon sun beating overhead.

"Who knew that spending time with your significant other could actually be relaxing?"

"Do you think I'm too worried about the kids?" Clara changed the subject.

"Honestly? Yeah. You're totally obsessing. They're gonna be okay, and if they're not okay – well, there's only so much we can do." Clara didn't say anything, continued to stare at the distant ocean. The Doctor tried to finish off her hazelnut-mint combo while she thought of what to say next to help ease Clara's mind. "I get it, Coo. We're coming up to these important exams, the end of your first school year as an actual teacher, but – it's going to be fine. I know it will be because you're a great teacher! You teach me things _constantly_. Like last week, with the laundry."

"It's not _my_ fault you're over a thousand years old and you somehow don't know how to roll socks into balls," Clara said, she who had done almost all of their laundry for the entirety of their marriage (which was a fair pay-off for the fact the Doctor cooked every meal.) And before she had Clara she had the TARDIS to do everything for her.

"But now I do! Thanks to you! But you have to relax or you're gonna go crazy. At the end, only a small amount of how well they do is actually anything to do with us. We provide the information but it's up to them whether they actually learn it, and it's like that for everyone who's ever worked in education. And they're just gonna resent you if you overload them with revision resources."

"English is a core subject, though," Clara said, "It's important. Not like History, History's not important, institutions and employers don't care about that."

"Hey! We both would've died a long time ago if neither of us knew anything about history."

"It's irrelevant. Who cares about anything old?"

"I know you're just making fun of me, but I'm deeply wounded. Especially when you're a relic of a bygone age yourself." Clara pretended to be offended for a moment and the Doctor smugly licked her ice cream again until Clara laughed and shook her head.

"Wow."

"An ancient relic."

"It just gets worse."

"I'm surprised you don't need help going to the bathroom at your age."

"This after I said you were sweet. Completely unwarranted." Thirteen smiled and went back to trying to finish her ice cream, wondering if Clara had been right earlier about wearing jeans on such a hot day. "Haven't spotted a photobooth yet, you know. They don't exactly have them just on the street."

"They always seem to in rom-coms."

"They're in, like, supermarkets and train stations."

"Maybe we should go to a train station?" the Doctor suggested.

"Or, alternatively, as adorable as reams of photobooth pictures clearly are, there's this thing called a mobile phone and most of them actually have cameras in them," Clara said, taking her phone out of one of the pockets on her dress (because in the future, women's clothes actually _did_ have functional pockets) and opening the camera. "Come on, let's commemorate this moment; we'll have to stop insulting each other for a few seconds."

"I'm never going to stop insulting you," she said, kissing Clara's cheek right when Clara laughed and took the photo. A green-and-beige lip-shaped mark now rested on Clara's face from Thirteen's ice cream, though she didn't notice this right away because she was looking at the picture. "It's totally cute. We should frame it."

"Hmm…" Clara was unsure, "I don't know."

"What else are you gonna do with it?"

"Save it for later?" she suggested, "Masturbate over it?"

"Oh my god. Unbelievable."

"Is it, though?" Clara said wryly, leaning towards her. Then, without warning, she stuck what was left of her strawberry ice cream into the Doctor's face, getting pink all over her nose. Clara laughed but Thirteen swatted at her hand, only Clara's grip wasn't as tight as she thought, and she ended up knocking the whole, partially melted cornet over the edge of the seawall. "Shit!" exclaimed Clara, looking over the edge just in time to see it land on the head of a tall bodybuilder-looking guy who was in the middle of flexing to impress a girl on the beach. " _Shit_ ," Clara repeated herself.

"OI!" the man shouted.

"Uh-oh," said the Doctor as he began to advance to the nearby stairs, "Run!" She grabbed Clara's hand and started to drag her in the opposite direction through the crowds. It was unclear what a gigantic bodybuilder was intending to do to a pair of women who were each barely over five feet tall, but the look on his face – after having it covered with ice cream – said that they certainly didn't want to stick around and find out.

They ducked and wove through the flowing tourists as the man continued to shout behind them, then got lucky and passed a zebra crossing right when the light turned green. They disappeared into the large crowd crossing the road and made it to the other side of the promenade where the souvenir shops and stands were all lined up beneath the midday sun.

"In here," Clara hissed, tugging on her arm and pulling her in another direction, into a dark and shady shop that was selling novelties. She pulled the Doctor into the aisles and then found a big, red drinking helmet and stuck that on her head, while she found a pink and fluffy cowboy hat usually reserved for only the sleaziest hen parties. A pair of gigantic, orange sunglasses each and they hid in the shadows and waited for the bodybuilder to rush past outside. He only looked in for a moment in his pursuit, pink liquid dripping down his face, but couldn't see them in the gloomy interior.

"I think he's gone," the Doctor whispered.

"That bloke needs to chill out."

"You would've thought that dropping an ice cream on his face would do that," she quipped, making Clara laugh as she removed her stupid hat and sunglasses. "I've always wanted one of these drinking helmets."

"I don't trust you with a drinking helmet," said Clara, lifting it off her head to her objections, "You'll fill it with Red Bull or espresso or something and then you'll be up all night critically analysing _SpongeBob_. Again."

"I just think that _SpongeBob_ has a lot more depth than people realise…" she mumbled, ultimately giving in to Clara and letting her put the hat back on the shelf.

"Of course it does, sweetheart," Clara turned to peruse the shelves as they were eyed by the attendant who was only really there to make sure nobody stole anything, since almost no transactions those days required an actual transaction with another person. They would have to buy something so that they didn't look like _complete_ weirdos. Clara gravitated towards a wall filled with various sticks of rock, many of them with inappropriate messages in them, but some relatively harmless. She picked out a black and purple one.

"It says: _Suck Me_." Clara laughed.

"I like this one," she pulled out a stick which was solid red and showed Thirteen the words on the end. This one merely said: _I Love You_ with a heart in the middle.

"Kinda boring."

"Really? Me loving you is boring?"

She shrugged, leaning on the shelves, "Kinda." Clara retrieved a blue and white one which said: _Wedding Day_.

"We should get some of these at our next wedding, give them out," Clara said, finally finding the shelf full of rainbow sticks. "Aww, I love this one." It said: _Mrs & Mrs_.

"…Okay, fine, that one is sort of adorable."

"You know what?" said Clara, "I'm buying it. I'm going to buy it for you because I'm _so grateful_ for you convincing me to leave all my revision planning for the day, even though you did almost ruin it by having some meat-head try to kill us."

"You don't have to-"

" _Yes_ , I do, so don't spoil it. _I_ am also capable of being sweet," she took out her phone and held her debit card app over the barcode on the rock, and it flashed green, meaning the purchase had been completed. A screen in front of the attendant would notify them of the purchase for their records. "Here you go, it's all yours."

"Thanks," she said, trying to suppress her smile and failing as she took the rock from Clara. She debated for a second, then, seeing the attendant's eyes were averted, she stole a kiss from Clara, who went pink in her surprise. "…Where to next?"

"Surprise me."

* * *

Heavy rain lashed the beach and the waterfront, making the sand around Palace Pier into a quagmire. His feet, leather shoes slick from the storm, slid as he tried to walk through the mud. He ran a hand through his hair to keep it out of his eyes, going towards an overweight mess of a man who scrambled away through the dirt. It was May 30th, 1964, and the weatherman in the newspaper had said it was going to be a clear evening; how wrong he was.

"Please, please," the man begged as the youth advanced, the rainstorm battening down from above, as though the universe was fighting against what was about to happen. He crawled like one of the stray crabs closer to the rotting, wooden pier, pleading for his life, spluttering on the rainwater. They were going to run out of beach soon, only a sliver remained with the moon hanging overhead, the tide overrunning Brighton's shores. "Please, Baby, you don't have to do this."

"I wanna do it," he said with the trace of a faint London accent, creeping towards the man like a predator and his prey, a menacing look carved into a deceptively young face.

"If this is about the money – I can get you the money! I just need a few weeks to work, to earn it, and every penny's yours, I swears it!"

"It ain't about the money, Fink. Good name, that. Fits ya."

"I wouldn't grass on no one, Baby, you knows that!"

Scrambling, he finally managed to roll over and get back to his feet, making a desperate break for it. The youth followed him, lunged, grabbed the collar of his coat and threw him down into the flooded darkness of the barnacle-covered underside of the large, old Pier. He splashed into the oncoming tide as it sloshed over them both. Thunder clapped overhead, streaks of lightning tore the sky to pieces. Albert Fink, Bertie to his friends, wasn't supposed to die that night; the youth knew that from his dreams. But none of that could change the fact that Albert Fink was, certainly, going to die that night.

"I ain't never talked to the coppers, Baby."

"Naw," said the youth, reaching into the pocket of his heavy coat and drawing out a straight razor, flicking the blade out from its dark wooden handle, "And you ain't gonna, neither." He stamped, hard, on the man's ankle, getting it between his boot sole and a rock. He did it hard enough that Fink screamed, a gargling noise that made the youth feel sickened. There was no way he could escape now.

"Please, let me go – I wouldn't – I won't even go to the hospital – I won't tell nobody anything – not even my wife! I've got a wife, Baby! Kids! Two of 'em! You're gonna take away their father?"

"I didn't have no father," he said, planting a leg either side of poor, doomed Bertie Fink, admiring his own razor in what little light managed to break through the storm clouds in the night sky, "And it didn't do me no harm. Now, then," he reached down his hand and covered Fink's mouth as the man began to weep, "Take a deep breath, this'll all be over soon."

He slashed the razor across Fink's unshaven neck, tearing into the sinew, the veins, his Adam's apple, with the intensely sharpened blade. Blood burst forth from the wound, a few inches deep, covering the youth's pale hands and his shirt sleeves before he had a change to move away. Then he stood up and watched Fink writhe there, gargling on his own blood and blubber, choking, his major arteries severed below his head. The youth waited until Bertie Fink was never going to move again as the tide swept up over his body. His big eyes bulged like a fish as they paled, milky-white, marbles set into the putrefying face of a fresh corpse.

After that, the air tasted different, as though it was electrified. He stood next to the body and felt something visceral course through his body, knowing – though he didn't know how he knew – that the future, his future, had been irrevocably changed from that point onwards.


	2. Brighton Rock - Chapter 2

_Brighton Rock_

 _2_

"I told you – didn't I tell you?" the Doctor said, grinning, as they stumbled through their own front door together, both in the midst of laughing. Laughing at what, it was tricky to recall, but they had finally got back to just enjoying each other's company without worrying about anything. No alien threat to fight, no students to teach, not even any chores to do – just the Doctor and Clara Oswald.

"Okay, okay, yes, today's been great," Clara admitted, locking the door, "It's been fantastic," she dropped her keys into the bowl near the door, "But do you know what'll make it more fantastic?"

"I have no idea," she lied. Really, she had a very good idea of what Clara thought could improve their day, the most exciting Friday in recent memory.

The scene was punctured by an explosive pain bursting into her head, like a migraine triggered by a gunshot. A deafening screech rang in her ears and felt like it was tearing her brain to pieces. Thirteen staggered, unable to hold herself up, and fell to the floor in front of her suddenly horror-struck wife. That was the last thing the Doctor could recall for an unknown length of time, and then the white-hot, blinding pain had receded enough for her to see an oval-shaped, white handset looming in front of her eyes. Had she fallen unconscious? When she started to mumble unintelligibly – speaking what she recognised to be native Gallifreyan out of some deeply-buried reflex, but which Clara didn't understand – Clara shushed her gently.

"You're alright," Clara told her, though she sounded uncertain in her tone of voice. Clara was kneeling in front of her on the staircase in their hallway, with the Doctor sitting on one of the steps. Clara was scanning her with the Helix unit they had brought with them; she must have fetched it from upstairs in the brief seconds or minutes Thirteen had not been present. The blue light hurt her eyes and she squinted and tried to push it away. "No, no, Helix needs to do a check."

" _Coo_ …" she moaned, feeling raw after the episode upon their return.

"Stay still," Clara said firmly, though not without a note of worry. The Doctor shut her eyes against the light and slouched against the wall, trying to look away. The sound of tinnitus, along with Helix's buzzing, was faintly present, as was a stiff ache inside her skull.

" _No abnormalities detected_ ," Helix said.

"What do you mean, no abnormalities?" Clara questioned, "She just collapsed and you're saying she's fine?"

"I am fine – turn it off," she managed to see, keeping her eyes shut tight. "Ignore the scans – just find me something… something with sugar."

"You've got your rock."

"Grab that." Clara felt about in the Doctor's jeans pockets – something which the Doctor would ordinarily find quite exciting – but came up short.

"I can't find it."

"How can you not find it? I had it a second ago."

"Maybe you dropped it?" Clara got up to look around on the floor in the hall, then phased through their front door. She was only gone for a few seconds, but in her weakened state the Doctor's hearts panged for her return. It came shortly. "Couldn't see it out there."

"I didn't drop it, I had it when we came in."

"Are you sure? Maybe you're confused."

"I'm not – I'm _not_ confused!" she said, louder than she wanted, then she pressed her hands to her eyes. She heard Clara leave, going towards the kitchen, and she returned a second later with a bar of Dairy Milk of her own she had been saving. The Doctor took it without hesitation, tearing open the foil and biting a huge chunk straight out of it. "Someone changed something. A fixed point in time."

"I thought that's impossible?" Clara sat down next to her on the stairs.

"It's not, it just has repercussions," she said, then thought, "Or, _Reaper_ -cussions." The sugar was helping her already as she ate the chocolate ravenously. "Did you hear it? The screeching?"

"I didn't hear anything."

"No… stupid, _stupid_ head, stupid brain…" She hit herself on the side of the head with the bottom of her hand, until Clara grabbed her arm and stopped her.

"Don't do that," she said softly.

"It's just so frustrating! It knocked me for six! A stupid timeline change!"

"C'mere," Clara put her arms around the Doctor and hugged her while she continued to eat her chocolate. Neither of them said another word until Thirteen had finished the entire chocolate bar, which just left her craving even more – she needed an energy drink but knew they didn't have any in the house.

"Is there any soda?"

"I'll go see," Clara left her side again to hurry down the hall and into the kitchen, where the Doctor heard her dig around in the fridge. Thirteen began twisting her wedding ring around on her finger, which was her usual bad habit whenever she became particularly stressed, it being one of the few things she had to fidget with. When Clara got back this time she was carrying a half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola, which Thirteen took gratefully and began to chug. It didn't take her more than thirty seconds to down the entire thing and then throw the empty plastic bottle onto the floor at her feet.

"Whoo!" she exclaimed, " _That_ hit the spot!"

"You feel better now?" Clara asked, concerned. She turned and managed to smile.

"I do." The caffeine had been a big help, too.

"…Have I been affected by changing a fixed point in time?" Clara asked.

"You? The interdimensional time traveller? No, you shouldn't be, you're oozing Artron and time energy; you've been absorbing it for fifty years. That'll grant you a certain amount of immunity. For a while."

"'A while'?"

"It's not _Back to the Future_ , Coo. You're not gonna start disappearing. _But_ , if I know about a change in history, the Reapers know about a change in history, and they'll come after me first, and then you immediately afterwards," she explained, "Look, all we have to do is, y'know, find what happened and fix it. It'll be localised and relatively significant to bug me like that, as in, not someone stepping on a butterfly ten million years ago."

"Alright, _so_ , we'll just check the local news," Clara said, taking her foldable tablet out of her pocket and opening it. The Doctor leant against her shoulder to look at the screen but the smell of her hair so close was suddenly distracting Clara. "Are you using new shampoo?"

"What?"

"I don't know. You smell good."

"Nice to see you prioritising the fact that somebody has changed an important part of history somewhere. And it's not shampoo, it's perfume. You remember when Zelda gave me that fancy perfume a few years ago? Well, I was looking for my Pokéball terrariums yesterday and the bottle is remarkably similar – though Squirtle still evades me… at least I found Bulbasaur."

"Remind me to give Zelda a proper thank you next time we see her," Clara whispered in the Doctor's ear. The Doctor shrugged like she was trying to brush away an insect and Clara smiled.

"I pray I never find out what that means. Go on, get to googling."

"I thought you hate when people say 'googling'? I thought you said it represents 'the endless reach of the capitalist oligarchy to be able to transplant itself into the vocabulary of common language so that nobody questions the economic dominance of a digital monopoly'?" Clara asked her. She began to stammer nonsensically.

"Yeah – well – I – you see – just, shut up." Clara snickered. "How do you remember what I say word for word?"

"Because I listen to you," she said, bringing up the news app on her tablet, "Always. And besides, one of us needs to be able to remember things."

"Hey! You ruined it."

"Shh, I'm trying to google." The Doctor scoffed and crossed her arms indignantly. "Oh, fuck me…"

"What? Right now?" Thirteen asked, surprised. Clara didn't answer, she was scrolling through articles on her tablet. "Clara? …Do you mean right now?"

"Shit…"

" _Clara_."

"Look at this," Clara showed her the screen. Thirteen read what she saw aloud.

"' _Gang violence continues to damage Brighton industry_ ' – hold on, gang violence?"

"It's not the only one, there's a running statistic here of the number of casualties associated with gang crime – it's almost _five-hundred_ , just this year so far. That's a hundred people a month, hospitalised because of gang crime. In Brighton! If these statistics were for stabbings in central London they'd be absurd, quite honestly." Clara went back to looking through articles with the Doctor observing.

Most of the articles they found were about crime and violence, including a poll which listed Brighton as one of the most dangerous places to live in the United Kingdom. House prices were way down – no longer was it incredibly desirable real estate (which did irk the Doctor a bit when she remember how much they paid towards their mortgage each month) but a gangland warzone full of what she could only describe as 'yobs.' Pale-faced savage children stabbing one another outside greasy spoon cafés and souvenir shops, throwing each other off the end of the landmark Pier. This was not the idyllic, crowded Brighton they had been walking through so recently.

"Okay, wifey, I take it back, maybe it _is_ like _Back to the Future_. Specifically, _Back to the Future 2_. Which one of us do you think has the hot mom?"

"There's nothing in here about Pride," Clara said, "Nothing at all. I saw this morning's issue of _The Argus_ about gearing up for Pride Month starting next week. Because they're doubling up on the amount of rainbow bunting in public spaces."

"What about that?" Thirteen pointed out a headline. Clara was aghast.

"' _Pervert Parade Not to Go Ahead_ '!?" she exclaimed, "Oh my stars, it's… it says, ' _Again, homosexual pressure groups have tried to organise a so-called 'gay pride event' in Brighton, the most conservative city in the country_ '… This is disgusting, it – Brighton's the gay capital of the UK. The only Green constituency. But apparently this seat now belongs to the bloody BNP! BNP hold for decades! A city full of racist, right-wing criminals! This is backwards, completely backwards." Somebody knocked at the door and Clara automatically got up to answer it, handing the tablet to the Doctor. "The reason we live here is because it's forward-thinking, liberal and free. And even if it wasn't, _this is the future_! These kinds of homophobic attitudes aren't even welcome in the most rural Tory stronghold, it's utterly obscene!" She opened the door to be faced with three gaunt, tall men, leering and wearing black suits and ties despite the boiling weather.

"Funny to hear you talking about things being obscene," the one at the front said. They looked like bouncers. Alarmed, Thirteen got up too and hurriedly put the tablet away.

"Who are you?" Clara asked, "Are you selling something? We don't need any quadruple glazing, thanks."

"Nah, we're not selling anything."

"Oh. Are you Jehovah's? Because we were just in the middle of converting to some other, totally conflicting religion, so you'd really just be wasting your time here."

"Surprised your type knows anything about religion."

"And what might 'my type' be?"

"Perverts. Heard a rumour that a couple of heathens were living here, in sin. Brighton isn't that kind of place. It's not acceptable to be bent around here."

"…Right," Clara said slowly, "Interesting idea. But, uh, I'm afraid I'm not really sold on the whole 'being gay is a sin' thing, because of the fact that you're a massive cunt." When she said this, she smiled.

"You fucking what."

" _Clara!_ " the Doctor exclaimed. All three of them drew knives.

"We'll gut you for that."

"Good luck." She slammed the door in their faces with her telekinesis, barely managing to get it locked behind them. A fist stuffed itself through the letterbox as far as it would go with a glinting, silver switchblade shining in the sun. "We need to leave."

"You think!?"

"You activate the undercover-thingy-"

"Failsafe perception filter."

"Yeah, that – I'll get the emergency bag."

Avoiding the flailing, stabbing hand of the twenty-something hoodlum hurling reams of vicious, homophobic abuse at them through the door, the Doctor took out her sonic screwdriver and made a beeline for the burglar alarm fixed to the nearby wall. But it wasn't just a burglar alarm; she removed the plastic case and revealed a highly complex security interface, all in case they had to make a swift exit or hide the traces of themselves from the house. She had been intending to use it in case they were hunted down by rogue aliens but supposed this was good enough. Activating the failsafe perception filter meant that everything inside was hidden and an emergency alert was sent to the TARDIS – though she doubted the TARDIS's ability to land when the timeline was so badly disrupted. After all, when Rose had prevented Pete Tyler from being hit by a car, the TARDIS was rendered utterly useless as the Reapers bared down upon them.

She also activated another security measure, one which created a forcefield around the exterior of the building, which would allow people to leave but not enter. Including both of them. It even blocked out the majority of teleports, save for the TARDIS. Though, again, she doubted the TARDIS would be able to help them at all.

Clara reappeared with a backpack and held out her hand towards Thirteen, just as the forcefield blasted the desperate arm away from their door. The gangster outside screamed in pain; no doubt he had received a nasty electric shock from it. The Doctor took Clara's hand and Clara steered her away to the back of the house.

"Brace yourself," Clara warned.

"Brace-? For what?" That question was shortly answered by her being phased through the kitchen table, all the cabinets, and finally the door into the back garden. Once outside she stumbled and fell into Clara's back. "You know I hate that!"

"Shh!" Clara hissed, "It saves time, just deal with it. _Come on_ , before they climb over the fence and come round the back." And so she resigned herself to being dragged around by Clara, running towards the fence into next door's garden and phasing straight through it. There was nothing the Doctor hated _more_ than phasing; it was one of the most uncomfortable sensations she had ever experienced, and she hadn't a clue how Clara did it so often without a care in the world. Utter indifference to the fact she was walking through solid objects.

After passing through about three gardens, however, the Doctor tugged on Clara's arm to get her to stop moving.

"Hold up a sec," she said.

"What?" Clara asked.

"This is the Thompsons' house. You know, Lyle Thompson's parents? In Year Eight?"

"So what? We shouldn't loiter."

" _So_ , this house is empty. Look at it. Two of the windows are smashed in. I did family trees with that class last term – you know, to get them thinking about how they're all related to history despite the arguments that 'it was ages ago.' And when I asked him about his he said his family have lived in Brighton since the 2010s in the same house. Since the London Olympics, he said. And now it's empty."

"Okay, so whatever we're looking for that happened must have happened before the 2012 Olympics," Clara said, "Unless you're suggesting that Brighton becoming overrun with gangsters is because Lyle Thompson's grandparents didn't move to East Sussex?"

"I'm just trying to pinpoint a time period. Not that we have any way to travel."

"You can just ring the TARDIS, can't you?" Clara started pulling her again.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Too dangerous. Reapers disable time travel."

"They can do that?"

"They're older than the universe, Coo. They come out of the time vortex as the world's immune system against temporal changes. They don't care about the so-called prestige of the Time Lords or you and I as individuals, they'll just devour anything that smells hinky."

"Great. So, there's Reapers after us because we're suspicious time travellers, and there's gangsters after us because we're suspicious queers. We just can't catch a break," Clara complained. She phased the Doctor through the fence at the very back of what was once the Thompsons' house into a thin, dirt snicket. They usually walked through that snicket if they ever went to the park, but it had deteriorated drastically with the timeline change. Now there was a rusty bike with a wheel missing, weeds everywhere, and more than a few cigarette butts and dirty syringes. "This is supposed to be suburbia. A family neighbourhood. Not drug dens and squats."

The Doctor sighed, then squeezed Clara's hand. "We'll fix it. I promise."

"How? With no TARDIS, no time travel, how are we meant to go back and fix it even if we _do_ find out what happened? We're sitting ducks here." She was about to launch into an explanation designed to soothe Clara, who was beginning to panic now that their lives had been mercilessly upturned by unknown causes, but she spotted those same goons who had been at their door making their way through the snicket in pursuit over Clara's shoulder.

"We have to find somewhere safe, come on." Now _she_ was the one leading Clara, letting go of her hand so that it was easier for them to move quicker.

"You know something? I'm over seventy and I've never actually had someone try to hurt me because of my sexuality. Let alone show up at my fucking house!"

"There's a first time for everything – just, hurry up, we gotta find somewhere to hide and… think. Give me that." She took the bag from Clara and slung it over one of her shoulders with the goons coming after them, but luckily the snicket was so narrow it was much easier for the pair of them to navigate than their would-be assailants.

"We're losing them, boys!" shouted one of the goons, "Ain't no dykes getting away from us."

"What did you just-!?" Clara almost turned on her heel to face them.

" _Clara_ , we have to go!"

"I can take them," she said, slowing down.

"It's not worth it."

"They shouldn't get away with saying that shit!" Clara argued.

"I know that – they're right on us, though! _Come on_ , don't risk getting hurt over a couple of jerks!" They were almost at the end of the snicket where they would be able to find a good hiding place, the boys just a few metres behind them as they ran. One of them drew his knife again as Thirteen wrenched on Clara's elbow to get her to keep moving rather than stand and fight. "Trip them up!" Clara glanced back and waved her hand, nearly stumbling herself in the process as the foremost yob had his feet pulled from under him, leaving him sprawling in the dirt with his cronies trying not to step on him. His knife landed in some nearby weeds.

They finally burst out of the long alley with the Doctor still forcing Clara to stick close. The Doctor slipped on a rain-slicked sidewalk and was plunged into gloom. Her hand was still wrapped around Clara's arm despite the fact the sky was suddenly a cloudy sunset and it had been raining recently, though to her best recollection it hadn't rained in Brighton for the better part of a week.

"Look out!" Clara exclaimed, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her out of the road right as the sound of buzzing engines whooshed by. She turned to see three vintage Vespas shoddily painted with Union Flags shoot by underneath the clouds. The Doctor was nearly knocked off her feet and would certainly have been hit if it wasn't for Clara. But a stabbing pain had entered her head again, like a migraine had come on in a split second, and she was left feeling woozy and concussed. The painted scooters all uniformly turned the next corner beneath the impossible sunset and the Doctor instinctively tried to follow them.

She staggered out into the otherwise empty street in pursuit, with a very confused Clara on her heels, no longer hearing the shouts of the youth gang chasing them. She held a hand to her head as if wounded and fell against the wall of an old brick building with her mind fixated on those scooters that had come out of nowhere. However, it was a fruitless pursuit; she looked around the corner and saw they were gone. The sound of the scooter engines had disappeared completely, leaving barely a residual echo. At the same moment the skies parted above and the afternoon sunlight she was used to poured down onto them again, but they remained around the corner and out of sight of the hoodlums on their heels.

"In here," Clara whispered, phasing them through the brick wall the Doctor was leaning against. They found themselves in an old and boarded up pub, full of dust and dirt and upturned chairs. "Get down, get down." They crouched and hid in the corner, out of sight through the gaps in the wooden boards over all the windows and listened to the sounds of the gang members outside.

"How do people just disappear like that?" one of them said angrily.

"I think they went this way," said another, his voice getting quieter. They were heading off in the wrong direction while Clara and the Doctor cowered in an abandoned building.

"This is the Travellers Rest," Clara breathed a minute later, while the Doctor held her head in her hands.

"Huh?"

"Our local pub. Where we go with people from work sometimes. Only it's empty, too… are you okay? What happened just then? With those bikes, and the sky?"

"Temporal shift," she answered as her headache began to subside. "Messed me up. My head. Time's unravelling here but we're the only time travellers who actually notice it. Like, we're at the eye of the storm, nobody else knows something is wrong, so the temporal fluctuations are attaching themselves to us."

"We're just going to get pulled to random points in time?"

"No, no – that's where we need to be. Wherever we were for a second just now, _that's_ where the change happened. A fixed point in time gets altered and time becomes sort of like a big knot. It's already kind of a knot, but now it's tangled up and doesn't know what to do with itself, so the Reapers come out to cut the knot away like they're cauterising a wound. Then the knot's removed, leaving this gap to sew itself together, only we're _in_ the gap so we're going to get cleared out."

"So what do we do? Sit around and hope one of those shifts happens and takes us back to the exact moment everything changed?"

"No," said Thirteen, unzipping the backpack to dig around in it and find something sugary. "The shifts will get longer and longer and longer, and we'll keep jumping between them, but the Reapers will still find us. And it's no good being stuck back in time somewhere if we still don't know what we're looking for. Imagine we get stuck, and there's, say, two hours to go until whatever change we have to prevent, but we don't know what that change is. We don't have the resources to find out." She found a paper bag of Jelly Babies, much to her overwhelming joy, buried deep in the bag. Sticking a fistful of them into her mouth she resumed her explanation with some difficulty over all the chewing. "If we work out what time period the shifts are originating from, it'll be easier to work out what we have to do. But the reality that we remember is collapsing in order to make way for this new one and if the Reapers get their way we're going to be destroyed in the process. Like we never even existed."

"Okay. So, we know it was raining, or had rained recently, and some people had some scooters. Do you know what model they were?"

"No, I didn't get a good enough look, with my head screwing up. Maybe we'll get lucky and find a shift with a convenient newspaper right in front of us, but I wouldn't hold my breath." She regressed to stuffing her face with as many sugary Jelly Babies as possible, while Clara pulled her knees towards her chest in the corner of the room. They were nestled together in the dirty corner of the old pub, a few beams of sunlight penetrating the wooden boards. Recognition of the Travellers Rest only came back to her slowly, but she could just about pick out the area where they and the other teachers sat whenever she and Clara actually made it to the pub. Many of the teachers were there multiple times a week, but they often went on Fridays, which happened to be date night. And Thirteen was very dedicated to keeping date night the way it was and _not_ spending it getting drunk in a pub. Luckily, Clara often agreed, because if there was one thing that could get Clara Oswald to resist the allure of alcohol it was the allure of sex. The Doctor never stopped using this to her advantage.

Clara rested her head on the Doctor's shoulder.

"Are you okay?" Thirteen asked when she had swallowed her latest handful of sweets.

"It's 2064 and we're in Brighton and some twat who's not even twenty just called me a homophobic slur and chased my wife and I out of our own house. If we were in the 1940s, or something, I'd just brush it off and say it's just a product of the time. Things will get better. But this is the time when things _are_ supposed to be better. They _were_ better. Being away from Earth for so long made me forget that there are people out there who will always think that there's something wrong with me." The Doctor looked at her as she sank down against the grimy wall of the derelict Travellers Rest.

"Hey, hey," she lifted up her arm and wrapped it around Clara, pulling her close, "Do I really have to tell my seventy-four-year-old bisexual wife that there's nothing wrong with being gay?"

"Maybe there is. It doesn't make sense, from an evolutionary perspective."

"There's a type of fish called a sunfish, they're these gigantic, wonky, weird-looking things. They're lopsided and huge, but to maintain their size they have to eat a _ridiculous_ amount of food. Except all they eat is tiny sea jellies. So they eat tons of these jellies, just so they can stay so bulky. The biggest bony fish on planet Earth. And guess what else? They have no natural predators. They're huge but they contain absolutely no nutritional value. They can't hunt but nothing hunts them, either, so they just float through the ocean syphoning up as much krill as possible and they haven't died out just because nothing wants to eat them. As far as your 'evolutionary perspective' is concerned, I think that sunfish are a lot more ridiculous than gay people.

"Besides, maybe evolution is cleverer than we give it credit for. Maybe species evolve to be gay in order to be surrogate parents for babies that get left behind? Queer penguin couples, or swan couples, or whatever couples – they've all been known to adopt babies that wouldn't survive otherwise."

"Mmm, but we haven't adopted anybody. We're pointless."

"I've got a little girl of my own, remember? You've got your Echoes. Our substitutes for our inability to reproduce with one another. _Anyway_ , looking at life through a lens of reproduction is pretty basic. You can contribute to society without making more people to be corrupted by it. Don't let them get in your head, Coo, that's what they want. To make you doubt yourself."

"Yeah…"

"Didn't you have this when you were growing up?"

"Have what?"

"Like… worries about homophobia. Fifty years I've known you and never thought to talk about this… I guess I take it for granted. Since I've never worried about it."

"I mean, Blackpool in 2004 isn't necessarily the worst time or place to come out as gay. Not that I ever really 'came out', per se."

"Oh yeah?"

"You get caught in bed with _one girl_ by your parents and suddenly everybody knows you swing both ways."

"Were they mad?"

Clara laughed now, shook her head. "No. A week and a half before they caught me in bed with Wade Sawyer-"

"Eurgh, don't remind me that you slept with _that_ creep."

"-and that was when I got the lectures all about contraception and STIs and teen pregnancy, and how I better have used a condom, and mum takes me to the doctors a week later to get a prescription for the pill. And _then_ they caught me with Melanie. Completely different. They burst into my room because they heard things, she's trying to hide in the sheets, they're just about to yell at me for sleeping with another boy – then they see it's a girl. Dad didn't know what to say."

"What about Ellie?"

"Mum was like, 'I'm just about to make bacon and eggs – do you want any?' And then she stayed for breakfast. I think they were a bit disappointed when I started _really_ putting it about instead of getting a nice, stable girlfriend. Although the sleeping around definitely got worse after mum died. So did the drinking and the smoking. I count myself lucky that I never _quite_ resorted to drugs back when I was in sixth form. Miracle I passed my A Levels, I was a state. Lucky I had you to make an honest woman out of me."

"That's a first, me making somebody else honest."

"Five decades and I've only shagged the one person."

"I did regenerate."

"The one-and-a-half person, then. Not quite two. And everyone said it couldn't be done."

"They say the same stuff about me. I'm sure some of the history books call me a womaniser, too."

"You are a womaniser."

"Gee, thanks."

"I'm a woman and I feel womanised. Bet Marilyn Monroe felt plenty womanised, too. And Elizabeth I. The virgin queen."

"She wasn't a virgin, I can tell you that for a fact."

"You harlot. You're so much worse than me just for the sheer audacity of your conquests. I don't even know the names of most of mine. I don't even know _your_ name."

"Ah, you wouldn't be able to pronounce it even if I did tell you what it is. Even if I could really _remember_ what it is." Clara smiled and nuzzled against the Doctor. "We've been in tougher scrapes than this, wifey. This isn't even us against the world. It's just us against Brighton. We can take this poxy town."

"Optimistic of you to say, while we cower in a mucky old bar. Hiding out in squats like this as though it's the 1960s and not the 2060s."

"The Stonewall Inn is a historic monument these days. Even though the gentrification of Greenwich Village is capitalist exploitation at its finest. Oppression of the minorities becomes a tourist attraction – isn't that always the way?"

"I love it when you moan about capitalism. Or just when you moan in general."

"I bet you do."

"Urgh. We were gonna spend the whole afternoon and evening in bed together, too, if none of this had happened. These dickheads are really gonna pay for making me miss out on hours of mind-blowing sex with my hot squeeze."

"Have you shaken your little bout of internalised homophobia, then?"

"Maybe…" she sighed, "What's our next move?"

"Oh, god," she groaned and leant her head back against the wall, "Uh, tracking spasmodic temporal shifts, here we go… do you know if the timey-wimey detector is in this bag?" She began rifling through the backpack again. It was transdimensional but had been packed a while ago and she couldn't be sure of its exact contents any longer.

"You gave it to Jenny," Clara said.

"Did I?"

"Yeah, you said that she'd probably need it more than you, when you handed over the TARDIS as well. You were like, ' _I'm not gonna need to track down weird, spacey stuff in Brighton_ ,'" Clara copied her accent.

"Is that true?"

"Yes, it's true," Clara said, Clara and her infinite patience for the Doctor's amnesiac tendencies. Thirteen never even realised what things she had forgotten until Clara said something offhand and her memory was foggy.

"I'm lucky to have you," she sighed, "I wouldn't be able to remember anything otherwise."

"Well, without _me_ , you would never have jumped into Belfast harbour trying to be impressive and heroic, so you never would have drowned and spent two weeks down there before finally being dredged up."

"You're right. I should've shaken you when I had the chance. Too darn clingy and too darn cute. Now, then… timey-wimey detector… I wonder if I can whip one up out of some of the junk in here?"

But in reality, the Doctor was grossly overestimating the amount of junk there would be available in a burned out, old pub suitable for the construction of complicated machines. With Clara's help, she had searched it from top to bottom and only managed to find very few items. It was filthy and anything of substance had been robbed years ago. As well as that, she suspected that the cellar was used as a drug den on occasion, obvious by the number of syringes, plastic baggies, and burned up joints and cigarette butts littering the floor. Unless she was planning to build a device to scan for intertemporal anomalies out of broken chair legs, they were screwed – and while the Doctor was good, she wasn't quite _that_ good.

Hours dragged by. The May heat persisted outside despite the dwindling light as the sun disappeared from view. The Travellers Rest looked much more orderly by the time she had worked up a sweat and wiled away her evening searching it, wedging table legs into place and balancing them in the middle of the main room. She thought it must be after nine at night when she finally found something to make their time on the lam a little less painful: a radio. It was just the kind of thing she had been looking for, and triumphantly carried it downstairs to show it off to Clara. By that point, Clara was exhausted and still nursing her upset after what had happened earlier with the boys. Thirteen couldn't blame her, it was her house too and she also didn't enjoy being on the receiving end of any abuse, even if she was a lot better at ignoring it.

Back in the front room Clara sat at the bar and scrolled lethargically through various websites on her tablet, still trying to pinpoint exactly what had gone wrong. Thirteen walked around to the other side of the bar as though she worked there and leant on it with her arms crossed, setting the radio down next to her. Only at this point did Clara look up and meet her smile.

"What'll you have?" she asked jokingly.

"Pint of wife beater, if you've got it," Clara quipped.

"Ha, ha. I don't know why you call it that."

"You seemed more upset the time I said I'd 'love a taste of Stella', so I thought it's safer to stick to wife beater. It's just a name."

"Here you are, complaining about those dirt-bags and their old-fashioned values, while you're spewing these normalisations of domestic abuse. Hypocrite." Clara turned her attention back on her tablet, obviously not in the mood for those kinds of jokes. The Doctor knew she only called Stella 'wife beater' to annoy her, anyway. "Hey?"

"Mm?"

"Look what I found," she indicated the radio.

"Does it work?"

The Doctor dug her sonic screwdriver out of the pocket of her jeans and aimed it at the radio. It didn't take more than a few seconds for the speakers to spring to life, serenading them in that static-y way transistor radios often did. She twisted the dials to focus it a bit more and discovered they were tuned into what was mostly a talk station, BBC Sussex, with some modern song just closing to give-way to the evening news bulletins. Hearing this, Clara turned off the display on her tablet and leant her elbows on the top of the bar, listening and watching the radio intently.

" _The main headline this week is the murder of Police Constable Daniel Murray of Hove, who was stabbed to death on Tuesday night outside what is allegedly a popular rave location for much of the area's youth. According to the status updates given to fellow officers over PC Murray's walkie-talkie the area in which he was stabbed was densely populated with as many as two-dozen witnesses during an ongoing party, though nobody has come forward to give a statement to Brighton & Hove's waning police force._

" _In a related matter, Superintendent Bridget Hartnell called an emergency press conference at six-thirty PM earlier and announced her early retirement from the force. Aged forty-three, the news that Hartnell is stepping down comes as a shock to many, as she ascended to the position just eighteen months ago and promised to make a dent in Brighton & Hove's high crime rate. Hartnell is the sixth high-ranking police official in the township to step down in the last four years._

" _In exclusive comments made to reporters from the_ Fletcher Tribune _, current Mayor Travis Sutton has repeatedly denied Brighton & Hove's high crime rate, maintaining that there is no more violence than in any other large city in Europe. He has declined to be interviewed for any other publications throughout the duration of his political career. Sutton has also repeatedly denied one investigative journalist's accusations that his bank statements reveal suspect transactions to local MPs and police officials, as well as incoming transactions paid by accounts which have been linked to organised crime groups, however a super-injunction passed two months ago means no further comments are able to be made._

" _In other news, farmer Bill Hannigan of the East Sussex area was recently awarded the world record for the biggest organically-grown marrow, offering some celebrity to an otherwise anonymous village_ …" The news stopped being relevant at that point.

"Good on Bill Hannigan and his marrow," the Doctor muttered.

"I don't recognise any of those names he said there," Clara said, frowning at the radio. Then she met Thirteen's eyes, "And I keep up with local politics, you know. Six police officials stepping down in four years? Accusations of the current mayor being involved with criminals?"

"Makes sense," shrugged the Doctor, "When the Five Families were big, every senator in New York state was on their payroll. Friends in high places, and all that jazz." Still not succeeding at improving Clara's low-mood, the Doctor then took it upon herself to change the station, remembering the channel for Clara's personal favourite station, Nought But Noughties (she thought the name was tacky.) She herself was thrilled when 'Grace Kelly' by Mika came on. "Oh my god. This is my jam. Style icon." Clara laughed.

"Who, Mika?"

"No, Gracie," she joined in the singing for just a moment when the pre-chorus drifted on, "' _I wanna be like Grace Kelly, but all her looks were too sad_ …' I've never met her, y'know. I wonder if she'd like this song… I don't think she ever looked _too_ sad."

"I don't know, _you_ look sad sometimes, and there's a passing resemblance."

"A passing resemblance?"

"All I'm saying is that when you made us watch _The Country Girl_ I was _convinced_ that was you making a cameo."

"Nah. She's taller than me. You know, they play this stuff in retirement homes now. For all the old people who sit there with their catheters and their heart medication listening to One Direction. This is old-timey-music."

"It's hardly Scott Joplin," Clara remarked.

"God, I wish there was a piano in here, so you could give us a bit of the old 'Maple Leaf.'"

"Are you trying to cheer me up?"

She sighed, "Trying to."

"No luck trying to build another timey-wimey detector? You can't use this radio for anything?"

"Not much, save for listening to music. Guess it's down to us. We'll have to put our heads together and come up with something more tangible… I've really gotta start carrying more machines around with us since crazy things keep happening. I sometimes wish trouble didn't follow me everywhere."

"Really? You're not loving the thrill of time being irreparably damaged and we're the only ones who can save it?"

"Maybe if saving it was squaring up to be a little damn easier. The odds are way against us. Why don't you try the internet again? Google some of those names we just heard? Sounds to me like this Daniel Murray cop was killed by one of those gangsters, otherwise at least _one_ of those witnesses would have come forward. Especially since the police must be looking for them."

"Something's got everybody here scared out of their wits," Clara sighed, opening her tablet again.

"Look up the phoney mayor."

"Travis Sutton…" Clara mumbled to herself as she typed his name into the search engine, a string of blue website links and advertisements appearing. "Hah. Travis Sutton is an international man of mystery. He's taken out nearly a dozen super-injunctions and has been accused of financially backing various gagging orders. NDAs about all his personal information, including the information of his aides, his family, anybody he knows… seems to be a habit most of Brighton & Hove's mayors have shared for decades. None of whom I know."

"Okay, so, politicians are corrupt. That's hardly news."

"In Brighton? Our actual mayor was at the centre of a scandal last year because she accidentally put her recycling in the main bin – it made the papers. Now a police officer gets murdered on duty with twenty witnesses and nobody talks? It's just a bulletin? One death out of many?"

"You're right. This is Commissioner Loeb level corruption. And we're Jim Gordon."

"Urgh, this is no use. There's barely any information out there. Nobody cares enough about what's happening in Brighton to go against its political elite and risk getting censored like all these other publications. I mean, for god's sake, _The Argus_ closed down in the 1990s it says here, but I was reading articles from _The Argus_ just this morning before we went out about that moody councillor's prospective education reforms. This is a bloody nightmare!" she exclaimed suddenly. Clara put her head in her hands.

"Hey, hey," the Doctor cooed, taking her wrists, "It's gonna be okay. We're gonna fix it. _I'm_ gonna fix it. I can't stand by and watch my wife be upset."

"I'm just tired…" she relaxed somewhat. Thirteen lifted up one of Clara's hands properly and kissed the back of it.

"We'll figure this out, Coo. All we have to do is… look out for clues."

"But there haven't been any clues."

"Not yet, but… I… we…"

Clara raised her eyebrows expectantly, but the Doctor's attention was waning as the radio buzzed and hissed with static, "Yes…?"

"Listen," she picked up the old radio with her free hand, twisting the dial to turn the volume up. "C'mere, c'mon," she tugged on Clara's arm to force her out of her seat and then vaulted spryly over the bar, "We're dancing."

"Dancing? At a time like this?"

"Times like this are the best times to dance, Oswald. It's a quick one, I promise," she put her arms on Clara's waist while Clara's went around the Doctor's shoulders, never one to turn down the opportunity for an impromptu slow-dance.

" _There was a love, I knew before; She broke my heart, left me unsure; Juliet, don't forget; The promise you made_ …" the radio crooned.

"This is the Four Pennies," the Doctor explained as the slow, melodic guitar riff continued to permeate the high volume of static within the device.

" _You gave me, sweet memories; Things you do reminiscent of you_ …"

"Are you sure this is the best use of our time?"

"If Reapers are going to come and eat us, then absolutely," the Doctor attempted to stay light-hearted about the very real threats facing them. But for moment, it didn't feel like those threats were real, because she had Clara Oswald in her arms, her dearest companion of all. And who cared if they were in a dystopic, corrupt, crime-ridden Brighton? Who cared if it was awash with old-school, offensive values and jumped-up, youthful gangland-wannabes? Who cared if they had been thrown aggressively out of their own house, into the streets, and had been holed up in a derelict squat of a pub for more hours than there were in the day? Who even cared that at that moment she didn't have a clue what to do to fix their situation? Suddenly, the Doctor did not. A port in a storm.

"Could be our last ever dance together."

"Then what a fitting song. 'Juliet.' This same week in May 1964, this was top of the British charts. Exactly a century ago, in one of my favourite decades on your tiny, little planet." Clara rested her head on Thirteen's shoulder as they swayed, hardly dancing legitimately at all, the song continuing on in the background.

"Throwback," she murmured.

"Well, exactly." She grew slightly concerned that Clara was going to fall asleep on her while upright, though that was unlikely as Clara was a notoriously light-sleeper and wasn't improving in her old age. Couldn't sleep without complete silence and pitch darkness, which had led to a fair few arguments before about how bright the screen display on the Doctor's original, silver Nintendo DS was.

" _Oh my Juliet, Julie oh Julie; Oh my Juliet… fades…_ " The song tapered off into the buzzing quiet of the radio's background noise and the Doctor and her wife remained standing in the centre of the empty, run-down room. After a few seconds another jingle started playing.

" _Caroline, Caroline_ …" the old music rang.

"Kind of strange choices for Nought But Noughties," Clara said quietly. And she was absolutely right. The Doctor stopped moving completely, still holding Clara's hips, listening.

" _This is Radio Caroline on 199, your all-day music station. We're on the air all day from six in the morning to six at night. This is Christopher Moore and you just heard 'Juliet' by the Four Pennies, the current number one in Great Britain. But now it's time for_ -" It completely cut off, hummed for a few seconds, and then resumed halfway through 'Shake It' by Metro Station.

"That was weird," Clara frowned, "Is there something wrong with that radio?" The Doctor didn't say a word, she was thinking, her mind whirring at a million miles an hour. Clara sounded very distant by comparison to the dead Radio Caroline jingle. Her thoughts raced as an epiphany dawned on her, all of the answers they needed in order to progress and restore Brighton's history to the way it was supposed to be. "Sweetheart? You okay?" Her eyes snapped back to meet Clara's, and without warning the Doctor kissed her deeply on her mouth for a long few seconds, completely taking her breath away.

Hands on Clara's cheeks, she pulled away and grinned: "Have I ever told you you're the most beautiful thing I've seen?"

"No. I mean, not today. What's this in aid of?"

"Come on, we're leaving." She stepped away from Clara to turn off the radio, shoving it back into their emergency supply backpack. "You're a genius, you worked it all out."

"I'm not sure I've worked anything out-"

"It's the newspapers – _come on_ , we have to take off. We're going to my favourite place in the world."

"Don't think I want you in my knickers right now, not when you've been touching all the dirty old stuff in here."

"The library, Clara. Not your pants. Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of complex thought _above_ wondering what _you've_ got going on downstairs. Now, get your head out from between your legs and hurry up – we have a gay seaside resort to save. And we're gonna do it analogue-style."


	3. Brighton Rock - Chapter 3

_Brighton Rock_

 _3_

From the outside, the Jubilee Library looked exactly how Clara remembered it. That was to say, it was an enormous, glass cube just a short way down the road from the Royal Pavilion. With the advent of more efficient electronic technology, the library had become twenty-four hours at least twenty years before they had moved back to Earth; she knew that because there had been a set of large placards installed recently discussing the building's history, considering it looked so bizarre and now-outdated. To Clara's eyes, born in the 1980s, she still thought it looked sleek and modern. The 2060s tabloids wholly disagreed.

But in their current timeline, it was not a twenty-four-seven operation whatsoever. In fact, it wasn't any kind of operation. A big, laminated notice was slapped across the door declaring Brighton & Hove's council were planning to demolish it in favour of 'new developments' at the suggestion and approval of the mayor – a man Clara had taken a decided dislike to already. The library and the surrounding area were just as empty as the Travellers Rest and the other houses on their street had been. It was painted with graffiti, wonky gang tags she didn't recognise, all sorts of blemishes she hadn't seen from a distance.

"Everything's derelict here," she complained. She was vaping, to the Doctor's irritation. She kept pointing out that at least she hadn't quite resorted to real tobacco and that e-cigarettes were incredibly safe in that decade. It was even candyfloss flavoured, but the Doctor would never approve. For fifty years she had been glaring over her shoulder at Clara for her nicotine habit, and Clara wondered that she wasn't going to strain her face muscles with such rampant objection. It was cloudless and cold out.

"I guess nobody cares about culture in this alternate reality."

"I'm never gonna be able to watch _Back to the Future II_ in the same way again. And I already can't watch _Back to the Future III_ because of the whole 'teacher Clara time traveller Doctor' thing. And I like the second one, it's my favourite. No one understands it these days. Back then, when I was growing up-"

"A young whippersnapper after my own hearts."

"Yeah, that – it was exciting waiting for them to finally invent self-tying laces and hover cars. And you know what? Eighty years later, and still no hover cars."

"Do you know how difficult it is to designate lanes and road safety laws with flying cars? Organising airspace for planes is hard enough," the Doctor told her, "I remember when we used to have more than one TARDIS back in the day – it could be chaotic sometimes. You don't wanna know what happens when two TARDISes crash into each other."

"The complete end of existence?"

"Something like that." Clara offered to phase them through the big glass door, but the Doctor was being fussy about intangibility after going through so many fences and walls earlier. For some reason she really hated having her molecular structure reorganised so that it could slide easily through solid matter – even though Clara had never had much of an issue with it. She hardly even felt any discomfort, it was a bit like walking from a cold room to a hot room.

The Doctor took out her purple-lighted sonic screwdriver to unlock the door, while Clara stood by impatiently with her vape. She kept glancing around expecting for them to be jumped by more homophobic gangsters – or worse, the Reapers that were out there somewhere, stalking the night to try and find the source of the temporal distortion.

Bored and a little cold, Clara gave up and phased easily through the glass door, turning to smile and wave at the Doctor once she got to the other side. Thirteen scowled at her.

"Why d'you gotta be like this sometimes?" she called through the glass, coming across muffled.

"Can't hear you," Clara lied, talking loudly, pointing at her ears as she switched off her vape, "Looked like you were telling me how hot you think I am." The Doctor shook her head.

"I wasn't."

"What was that? You want me to take my clothes off, did you say?" Thirteen stuck her tongue out rudely at Clara, who laughed at her. Finally, she succeeded at tripping the old lock, so the automatic door swung open. Clara stepped out of its way. "You lasted a very long time there."

"You're the filthiest woman alive," the Doctor snapped, "There are more important things going on right now than you trying to get laid."

"Beg to differ."

"Whatever. Help me find the newspaper archives."

"Why? You still haven't explained yourself, just dragged me off into the streets. A girl could get the wrong idea from late-night escapades like this."

"All your ideas are wrong."

"Charming."

"What happened with the radio was another shift," the Doctor began to explain, taking off the emergency supplies backpack so that she could retrieve the flashlights they kept in there. "I wish I kept more stuff in my pockets…"

"Nothing's stopping you."

"Well, it's too much hassle having to move the entire contents of my pockets from one jacket to another. And I can't just wear the same jacket all the time – what if I have a specific look I'm going for? It might spoil my outfit." She knelt down on the floor to rifle through the contents of the bag.

"If you hadn't given your normal transdimensional bag away to Jenny when you went to the past-"

"Even then it might not go with everything."

"Unbelievable. You're such a… girl."

" _Wow_. That is the single most upsetting thing anybody has ever said to me."

"Shut up."

"Me, a girl, called a _girl_?"

"I _said_ , shut _up_."

"It's so offensive. Think fast." She tossed Clara one of the torches after she zipped up the bag. Clara barely managed to catch it, seeming alarmed that the Doctor had thrown something towards her to begin with. "You catch like a girl."

"I'll show _you_ what I do like a girl," she said, annoyed.

"The tone of that sentence did not match its content. Honestly, you're cute, but it's all on the surface. No depth, no personality. And you're definitely not getting your end away tonight. _Now_ ," she clapped her hands after sufficiently insulting her other half (the better half, Clara thought), " _Newspapers_. _Important_. End of time as we know it could well be on the horizon, don't want to get eaten by giant, space-bat monsters."

It was pitch black and totally empty in the Jubilee Library. Books thrown from the shelves, it was like a tornado had come through and all the evacuees had never come back. Clara had the distinct urge to tidy them all up because she hated seeing books in such a state of disarray, but knew that if they restored time to the way it was supposed to be none of the books would ever suffer this level of neglect.

"I wonder if any of my poetry collections are in here…"

"Seems like the kind of thing this corrupt council might have removed. Your poetry is a bit explicitly homosexual."

"Maybe if you were a bit less of an explicit homosexual, things wouldn't be that way."

"Oh, but they wouldn't be half as good. Now, then. Radio Caroline on 199. Radio Caroline is a pirate radio station, or it _was_ , a long time ago."

"Why do they call them 'pirate' radio stations? I've always wondered," Clara inquired softly as they tried to find any kind of map.

"Because, wifey," the Doctor began as Clara located a plastic sign nailed to the wall that showed the different sections of the library colour-coded; in all the other times she had been in there she had never needed to find the newspaper archive, "They broadcasted them from ships. Bought rusty old freighters, took them out into international waters, and played records on the air. Totally illegal and _totally awesome_. But Radio Caroline, see, it went off the air completely in 1990. And he said that 'Juliet' by the Four Pennies was the number one that week, that week being the week beginning on May 22nd, 1964. Two months after the station started to broadcast.

"Plus, come on – Union Jack Vespas? Can things _be_ more Sixties?"

"But why are we looking for newspapers?" Clara asked, taking her hand and pulling her in the direction she had worked out the archive was, far in the back of the building.

"Okay, we're fluctuating right now, yeah? Everything out here that's changed is giving off a signal, temporal energy – but now we have a date. Something happened that week, which is _this_ week exactly a hundred years ago. It's the butterfly effect, Coo – one thing, maybe a tiny thing, will have happened and allowed all of these enormous changes over a century. But the first thing to have noticeably changed will be the papers, especially if they reported on whatever happened. I can scan for things that have been altered, and any earlier papers will obviously be unchanged. And it's only seven papers from that week we have to find."

"Sounds like dousing."

"It's a similar concept. Though there's a lot more science behind it – dousing is a load of hooey, no offence."

"No offence to who?"

"I don't know – people who believe in dousing? How am I supposed to know what kind of mumbo jumbo you believe? The other day you told me you think teeth are made of bone, which is frankly ridiculous."

"I'm not a bloody dentist."

"Clearly."

"Here we go, through this door," Clara said. The door needed a key card to get through, though the Doctor had a much easier time affecting this lock than the one on the entrance. It led downstairs, a narrow staircase, dusty and covered in cobwebs. They went single-file, Thirteen first, both of them holding their torches carefully aloft. "Hopefully, since nobody broke the lock, things will be mostly intact down here."

"Yeah, I guess all the criminals out here don't really care about centuries-old, archived papers and left them be. Lucky for us. Oh, jeez…"

"What? What is it?" Clara asked, but she very shortly saw what it was. The archives were not the most penetrable of records. Big, electronic, moving shelves stored them, all labelled with coded letters and numbers. "Right. Well."

"How're we supposed to work out what any of this means?"

"It has to mean _something_. This is a library. It's meticulously organised. Thankfully, your wife happens to be a professional academic," Clara announced. She was the one who arranged all their books in their house, while the Doctor was fine to throw everything in a pile and rummage around for hours to find it later. But she had her very anal system, and the one in the library looked just as bad. "We're looking for 'A' for 'Argus', right?"

"I don't know, there are other papers – aren't they organised by date?"

"No, they're alphabetised by publication name and then sub-organised by date," Clara said upon examining the codes, "But _The Argus_ is in this rack, if we could get into it."

"I'll do it," she said, handing Clara her torch so that Clara possessed them both, "Hold the lights over me so I can see." She did as asked.

"Don't these things need electricity to work?"

"We've got electricity. Okay, sure, the energy companies will have cut this building off years ago, but they don't disable the infrastructure. They flipped the switch in their fancy headquarters, I'll flip the switch back in our favour remotely and funnel some juice into these old shelves. You just have to tickle it a bit."

"Tickle it?"

"Yeah. It's touchy. Slippery."

"Like the g-spot."

"If you like."

"What kind of an event do you think we're after?"

"Something that irrevocably changed the course of history enough to inject a big dose of corruption into Brighton's liberal infrastructure and killed Britpop stone dead. Although, I feel personally privileged to hear a Radio Caroline broadcast in this day and age. There's a rot at the heart of this city that's been festering for a century, and we're going to find out why."

"I love when you say a bunch of things and don't actually explain anything whatsoever," Clara quipped.

"You're being sarcastic, but I know you could listen to me talk for hours about nothing. Ah- _ha_ ," she got the lights on the side of the big, moving shelf to turn on, grinning. Automatically, the shelves further down the line began opening in order to move up and let them into the 'A' section. "Truthfully, I don't know. I think that what's happened is the result of criminals seizing power over the city – not that I know why they'd want to destroy Brighton, of all places – but there's any number of power-plays gangsters can make to do that kind of thing. A lot of it could be behind-the-scenes, unreported on."

"Oh, I see – so these archives are a stab in the dark?"

"They're our best bet," she said a little quietly. Clara was trying to work out how convinced the Doctor was of her own plan.

"Suppose it's a good thing the _Argus_ archives don't go past 1994," Clara sighed, "Must be when the paper got shut down…"

"…What was the name of the other paper you were looking at?"

"Hmm? Which one? I've read a lot of articles today."

"The one the mayor, Sutton, the one he comments to exclusively."

"The _Fletcher Tribune_."

"Never heard of it."

"No, me either…" Clara said, "And I pay attention to the papers after not having access to daily news for so long." Thinking about this, she left the Doctor to meander down the side of the shelves as they moved until she got to 'F', finding the suspect _Fletcher Tribune_ right there, with its dates ranging from 1978 to 2030, which was about the time the majority of papers in the country began being online exclusively. 1978 wasn't the year they were looking for, but it did give Clara the idea to look the publication up specifically on her tablet. "I wish I was always able to just google stuff when I'm with you, you know."

"Not enough internet access throughout all of time and space? Instant information makes people lazy. Time was, people just knew things."

"Thrilling," Clara said dryly, only half-listening as the Doctor ventured into the dark shelves with her torch. "Although it's very hard to know things when your entire timeline has suddenly changed."

"Yeah, yeah." The _Tribune_ was big enough, despite being a measly, local rag, to have a page on Wikipedia. A page on Wikipedia with a lot more information than Clara was expecting. "Here, listen to this: the _Fletcher Tribune_ was founded in 1978 as a rival paper to _The Argus_ , by someone called Finley Fletcher, who became the mayor of Brighton in 1980 after a landslide local election, despite very public affiliations with organised crime and accusations of being involved in the suicide of his wife Lily Fletcher, née Watson, in 1966… became a member of the House of Lords in 2002 where he allegedly lobbied against laws improving rights for minority citizens – basically anyone who wasn't a straight, white, male Roman Catholic. He came up with a new paper, pushed the _Argus_ out, and installed this _Tribune_ as the primary source for information."

"Control the media and you control the people," said the Doctor. "You said 1978? So that's sixteen years between this one coming out and the _Argus_ going defunct? They must have been publishing stuff this guy really didn't like." Clara put her tablet away again and joined Thirteen in the racks of musty papers, most of them over a century old. While the Doctor continued her search for May 1964, Clara tried to bridge the twelve-year gap to 1978, which she managed a lot quicker. So many degrees had got her better at browsing boring shelves than her wife. She rifled through a box until she found one with an emblazoned headline reading: _MOB RAG DEBUT_.

"Like this, you mean?" Clara said, holding it up to the Doctor and shining her torch on it.

"Yep. I suppose that would do it. What's it say?"

"That the notorious gangster Finley Fletcher, AKA Baby-Faced Fletch, who looks like he has a finger in every pot when it comes to Brighton's industries, has brought out a paper to try and silence the truth they're printing in the _Argus_. Which has a much more revolutionary tone than I remember it when they'd hardly even take a stance on their own constituency's by-elections. 'Since his rise to prominence in the mid-1960s, Fletcher has made it his mission to end free speech in Brighton and seize control of the area. His influence stretches as far as the capital as Fletcher invested a suspect amount of money to block legislation allowing women the right to be paid equally.' Can you believe that? Some jumped-up little shit has single-handedly prevented the Equal Pay Act from ever being passed!"

"Mid-1960s? What's he look like?" Thirteen asked. Clara unfolded the paper – faintly aware that she should really be wearing latex gloves when she handled it in case it disintegrated between her fingers – and revealed a very faded photograph of a severe looking man, around thirty, with a scar cutting across his left eye and more of his cheek. "Prominent scar like that is good news for us." He had ghostly white skin, icy blue eyes – the scarred one bloodshot – and dark hair. Menacing was the word which best fit him. "Found it!" The Doctor suddenly exclaimed, making Clara jump. She wrenched out a large, cardboard file box containing all the newspapers from May that year, beginning to scan them individually with her sonic.

"You should just find today's paper," Clara said, "If it's exactly a century. May 30th."

"Good call…" she finally drew one out and scanned it, but just frowned, annoyed. "Nothing, no reading. Hasn't been changed."

"Well… I guess it takes the papers a while to report on something that changed history, right?" Clara was right. There may be nothing in the paper for the 31st, but when it came to the next day they finally made progress.

 _MURDER UNDER THE PIER_ , the headline read, with a picture of the underside of Brighton Pier and a few old-time police officers gathered around.

"It's this," the Doctor declared, "I can feel it, this murder is what's changed." She began to read aloud, "' _Late yesterday evening, London-based bookmaker Albert Fink of the Golden Stalls was found dead underneath Palace Pier in a gruesome suspected homicide, his throat cut from ear to ear. The constabulary have yet to make an official statement, though an officer at the scene expressed a desire to implore anybody with information about the event to come forward. Fink has a wife and two children currently residing in Soho, London, and his tragic death is expected to cause them great suffering. No arrests have been made_.' This guy, Albert Fink, he's not supposed to die. This is a fixed point in time, you can't change a fixed point in time without some very knowledgeable meddling. It's not a mistake.

"It's almost ten o'clock… We need to find a way to get to 1964 and save Albert Fink's life, pronto. Tear the front page out of that paper from '78."

"You're joking, right? It's basically an antique. What do you want to go ripping it apart for?"

" _Clara_ , if we succeed at changing time, that paper won't even exist. You keep saying it, _Back to the Future_ – we take the paper and if the front-page changes then we know that we've succeeded, okay? Hurry up. We're exactly synchronised with a century ago, which means that this murder is happening, like – well it could be happening now, for all we know. At some point during the night of May 30th into the 31st."

"Alright, alright," Clara said, ripping the _MOG RAG DEBUT_ page from the front of the decrepit, yellowing print of the _Argus_. She turned to hurriedly follow the Doctor out of the basement archives and up through the narrow passageway, returning to the dark ruins of the Jubilee Library's first floor. Thirteen was rushing now, a set goal in mind, Clara chasing at her heels like a puppy. "But how are we supposed to get to 1964, Doctor? We don't have a TARDIS and we don't have the time to go hijack some time-travel device from UNIT-"

" _Because_ time is collapsing around us. But we don't belong here. In Brighton, I mean – or even in the ordinary continuity of time and reality itself. We're loose because we're both so imbued with the background radiation of the time vortex and the artron energy. We don't have any more of an attachment to 1964 as we do 2064, which means we can hypothetically take advantage of the temporal shifts and slide through from one place to other, especially since nobody else has been able to see them. When those Vespas appeared, it wasn't Brighton that moved, it was us, which is how we lost those kids. Do you see? The closer we get to the point of this murder, the more corrupted and broken time becomes and the easier it will be for us to potentially slip through the cracks."

"So where are we going?" Clara asked, the Doctor half-running to get to the exit so quickly and burst out into the cool, night air.

"The pier. Closer we are to the pier the more likely experiencing a shift is gonna be."

"And what if we don't experience a shift?" Clara asked. The Doctor stopped dead in the empty street in front of her. In the night she could hear police sirens coming from somewhere, as well as the thumping bass of more than one party – yet everybody seemed too afraid to come out at that time. It wasn't even particularly late. "What if we don't get lucky?"

"Then… then, you just have to remember that you're my-"

"Look out!"

Clara tackled her when a car came seemingly out of nowhere directly behind the Doctor. She knocked them both to the ground hard enough to escape the oncoming vehicle, its headlights burning through the rain as the sound of music and drunken singing came from within. When her hands touched the pavement, they found a soaking wet puddle she had inadvertently thrown the Doctor right into, now lying on top of her in the cold night in what had suddenly become a rainstorm. Not wearing a coat, she was soaked to the skin almost immediately, while the Doctor beneath her sat up on her elbows. Above them thunder rolled and the rain worsened, but they were being stared at. There were people walking up and down the streets, people in old-fashioned clothes, dresses and suits.

"Are you okay!?" she asked the Doctor in horror, but the Doctor was already trying to sit up, leaving Clara to kneel either side of her in what she soon realised was a straddle. Not that the Doctor was interested, and she herself was really just worried because she had almost seen her wife hit by a speeding drunk driver.

"I'm fine, but we're… this is…" she stared around and then laughed, grinning, " _Clara_ – the shifts! I told you we'd make it!" And then Clara finally put together what happened: they had travelled in the blink of an eye back an entire century, back to 1964, with Brighton once again a bustling, vibrant city. One not full to the brim with vicious, homophobic gangsters. "As much as I deeply enjoy pretty, Earthling girls sitting on top of me, we're in public and on a strict schedule."

"What?" Clara asked, feeling dazed. They were being stared at, after materialising out of thin air and almost mowed down. The Doctor cleared her throat. " _Oh_. Shit, sorry." She got back to her feet and then held out her hand to help Thirteen up, too.

"How gentlemanly of you," the Doctor joked, heading over to the pavement so that they were out of the way of anymore wild cars.

"After I mounted you in public, and everything. Is there an umbrella in that bag?"

"Uh – I don't know. Here." The Doctor handed the backpack over to Clara as they resumed their journey towards the pier through the torrential rainstorm. "How far away from the pier are we?"

"Dunno. Ten minutes? Bit less?" She continued to rifle around in the bag, sticking her arm in it down to the elbow. "What else is in here?"

"Just stuff. Emergency snacks. Emergency condiments. Clean underwear. Modified satellite phone."

"But no fancy scanners and no vortex manipulator. Because god forbid you make things too easy for us."

"I like a challenge." Clara found a compact umbrella eventually and returned the backpack to the Doctor as she opened it. "It's cold. Do you think it's cold?"

"It is a bit chilly," Clara said once the umbrella was up and the heavy rain could be heard battering the fabric above. "We'll have to share our body-heat," she joked, taking the Doctor's arm. The weather was too bad for people to take much notice of two women arm-in-arm, especially in Brighton, paving the way for liberal thinking for decades – at least, it was in the proper timeline. "How are we going to get home?"

"We're not, we're going to start a whole new life in the 1960s. Like when the Weeping Angels stole the TARDIS and sent me and Martha back to '69."

"Please, don't use the words 'Martha' and '69' in the same sentence – I shan't be able to function."

"Ha, ha. I'm kidding. Once there's no threat of Reapers I'll just call Jenny. _Although_ …"

"What?"

"It _is_ a time machine. We could always hang around. Have a vacation."

"You said the exact same thing when we drove through that rift and got stuck in 1912 for a week."

"Well, _yeah_ , but – opportunity for a free holiday?"

"When have we ever had a holiday that _wasn't_ free?" Clara asked.

"Look – it's just – all the hustle and bustle, the revision, the exams coming up," Thirteen began as they hurried through the rainy streets, past all kinds of vintage cars Clara couldn't put names to, the air drenched in the smell of sea salt and fish and chips. "It's just eating away at our time together, you know? I've talked to you more today than in the last few weeks combined."

"It's the summer holidays in less than two months."

"I know…"

"I bet nobody else has ever called you clingy before."

" _Clingy_!?"

"You're so used to spending every second of every day with people."

"Actually, there's a good eight hours of every day when you're asleep and I'm awake. You humans get tired so easily. No wonder you consume so much caffeine."

Clara sighed, but eventually relented and said, "Okay. Since you're being all pathetic and begging me – though I highly suspect that what you're really after is a shag-"

"I wouldn't say _no_ to one…"

"-We can stick around for a while. Especially if we fail to stop ourselves being erased from existence."

"Actually, it would only be these versions of ourselves who would be erased, and only in this universe. Somewhere out there in the vast, inter-dimensional multiverse I'm sure we're fine. More than fine. In bed together."

"I'll take great comfort in that," Clara said dryly.

Quickly they wove through groups of rowdy people on their way home from a night of partying, drinking and fun down on the seafront. They laughed and swayed and fell over each other with a sense of happiness Clara could only long for at that moment, other than the feeling that her world was going to explode into a million pieces and leave her sprawling in the dirt of non-existence. She wished _she_ was drunk.

The Doctor flinched and staggered, almost tripped.

"You okay?" Clara asked urgently, holding her up by her arm.

"It's nothing, I just heard them again, that's all. They could show up any time now, closer we get to the incident the more dangerous it's gonna be," she said, meaning the Reapers. "Hopefully they'll work out that we're trying to put things back to the way they're supposed to be and not make them worse…" The way she said it sounded like she was only trying to comfort Clara and she didn't actually believe her own words. But the Doctor could often be like that. Baseless as it may be, Clara blindly decided to adopt that hope because it was the only one she had left to cling to.

They made it to the seafront themselves, finally. Frosty sea air made the rain bite, hazy yellow lights glowed up and down the promenade and the pungent smell of fish and vinegar made the mist thick and gluttonous. There was a rather surprising police presence out there, too, Clara noted.

"What's with the police? Are you sure the date is right?" Clara asked, "The pier's a public place to kill someone anyway, let alone with all this."

"It's because just under two weeks ago there were riots on the beach," Thirteen explained, "Mods and Rockers. Big fight. More than a thousand unruly teenagers involved. Makes our jobs look easy, huh? Imagine trying to break up a fight of a thousand teenagers. That's what _Quadrophenia_ 's about."

"I'm just waiting for you to instigate a resurgence of Mod culture back home."

"Oh, you know I'd love to – but how would I reconcile it with the Rocker side of my personality?"

"A real dilemma. There's the pier," Clara changed the subject by pointing it out, a shadowy skeleton with a few bright windows across its distinctive architecture. The Doctor slipped her arm out of Clara's so that they could cross the street, careful to watch out for trams coming (because trams never managed to stop for pedestrians), heading to the slippery steps. The Doctor managed to jump down them without slipping, while Clara was much more careful and found her wife a few moments later squinting into the gloom beneath the pier's rotting slats.

"No one's there yet," she said, taking Clara's hand that wasn't gripping the umbrella, "C'mon, let's hide where it's dark. A historical landmark like this will keep the Reapers away for long enough that we can stop Albert Fink from dying."

"In with all the crabs and the seaweed – you _do_ know how to treat a girl."

"It's hardly the worst place either of us have been in," she said, "Amy and I once fell into the stomach of a Starwhale."

"Not as great as getting eaten and then shit out by a giant space-worm, though," Clara said, "Jack and I can attest to that."

"Then you've made my point for me; seaweed is not as bad. You're a seaside gal – are you going to tell me you've never hooked up with someone underneath any of Blackpool's piers?"

Clara laughed, "Touché. At least it's out of the rain down here." They climbed the gentle incline of the beach, very little left of the sand at that time of night as the tide swept in. Within the hour it would be right up to the seawall, obscuring all of the golden shore with grey, stormy water. The Doctor had to pick up a crab to sit down, lifting it by its bag so that its claws didn't get her. Used to picking Captain Nemo out of his tank whenever it needed to be cleaned (albeit it with chainmail gloves), the Doctor was unfazed and dropped the crab safely down a few feet away. It scuttled off in the opposite direction. Clara closed the umbrella and sat down on the damp sand.

"I'm so desperate for a cigarette," she complained.

"The light would give us away," the Doctor said, "We're in the shadows here. Being sneaky."

"You don't have to tell me about being sneaky; I'm the Phantom."

"Uh-huh."

"'Sneaky' is my middle name."

"Sure it is, Coo."

"What's on the History GCSE papers, anyway?" Clara asked in a desperate bid to find something distracting to talk about. The Doctor paused before answering. "You have looked at the syllabus, haven't you?"

" _Yes_ , what kind of person do you think I am?"

"An irresponsible one who hates being told what to do by the people who write exam papers?" Clara suggested.

"I do hate it, but I understand how it works. The Cold War is on it as well as the post-WWII dissolution of the British empire. And the Qin dynasty."

"What, really? That's a bit out there."

"Vaughn wanted to mix things up a bit when he choice the modules. Why? How do you choose what modules you make the English department teach?" the Doctor asked her wryly.

"They give us a big list of government-approved texts and I get to have at it." She could hear happy people up on the pier above them along with the lapping of the choppy waves against the shore, the rain battering the surface of the sea. Wind lashed them as they huddled together in the shadows.

"So you pick your favourites, huh? I think Vaughn likes the Qin dynasty. He has this picture of him with one of the soldiers from the Terracotta Army on his desk."

"I have a picture of my wife and I on our wedding day on my desk," Clara said, which Thirteen knew full-well because it had been her who had given Clara the framed picture as a moving-in present when she had been given the head of department position a few months ago, which included an office.

"Your point being?"

"That it's very easy to tell that Nick Vaughn isn't married."

"He could marry a Terracotta soldier. They're a robot army. This guy, a total jerk, Meng Tian – general of the Qin army – had a warp converter to wake them up and take over the whole world. That's why I've never taken you to see them, don't want to trigger them to do anything."

"I see you're very qualified to teach the kids about Ancient China."

"Of course. I'm hoping he'll let us do pirates eventually, but I think the Manifest Crisis is entering the potential syllabus soon."

"What? You're kidding?"

"It lasted from 2013 to 2029, it's a big part of history. Plus, if we study it, that means I can watch _X-Men_."

"Blech. You won't be watching it with me."

"I'll show it in class. Anyway. Even today, you know people still have to have those medical cards that say whether they have an ancestor who carried the virus." Clara, of course, was fully aware of this, not in the least because she was a Manifest herself.

"What angle would you be teaching it from? The one where it's a deadly contagion that needed to be controlled, or the one where a bunch of innocent people were locked up in inhuman prisons and experimented on? Ostracised from society, sent into hiding? An entire, new underground railroad dedicated to freeing people from Silverstorm and the HCC headquarters?" Clara questioned her. Clara had seen the whole thing, but the Doctor hadn't. She hadn't ever met Klein, just heard about it second-hand.

"The handling of the Manifest Crisis is generally seen as a bad tactic on the part of the right-wing, militaristic government of your youth, Clara," the Doctor said coolly, annoyed at Clara bringing her integrity into question: would she teach the truth, or what the syllabus said? "Okay, it all happened fifty years ago. Fifty years before _you_ sat your exams was the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. It was widely accepted, and still is, that the Civil Rights Movement was a good thing. Not good that it was necessary to begin with, obviously, but I'm just pointing out that perceptions change faster than you think. Especially when you all die off so quickly."

"And yet earlier today I was attacked by homophobes in my own house in the distant future."

"I wouldn't say it was _distant_ , but…" Clara looked at her expectantly when she didn't finish her sentence, but the Doctor's eyes were elsewhere. She elbowed Clara and then pointed, silently, as two figures moved along the beach, one advancing dangerously towards the other. The murder, Clara thought, it must be! And they hadn't even made a plan. Typical.

"Please, please," a corpulent man staggering through the rain begged. They were a good few metres away from Clara and the Doctor, though, closer to the sea. "Please, Baby, you don't have to do this," he said after slipping and falling onto the slick, wet sand.

"What is this? An Edgar Wright movie?" Thirteen whispered. Clara shushed her.

"I wanna do it," the second man, barely a man at all, said threateningly. He leered with his pasty complexion towards his prey, a thin and prominent scar cutting his left eye. The wound Clara had seen on the frontpage of the _Argus_ from 1978, the one she had stashed in her pocket after tearing it away.

"If this is about the money – I can get you the money! I just need a few weeks to work, to earn it, and every penny's yours, I swears it!" Albert Fink sobbed.

"It ain't about the money, Fink. Good name, that. Fits ya."

"I wouldn't grass on no one, Baby, you knows that!" He dragged himself desperately across the sand before hastening back to his feet. But he didn't get far, only a few feet before the younger version of Finley 'Baby-Faced Fletch' Fletcher grabbed his coat and pushed him to the ground. He splashed into the water of the oncoming tide. They were now fully underneath the shadow of the pier. "I ain't never talked to the coppers, Baby."

"Naw," the boy drew an object out of the inside pocket of his coat, which glinted in the distant lights of the seafront venues and revealed itself to be a straight razor, sharpened to lethality. "And you ain't gonna, neither." He lifted a boot to stamp on Albert Fink's ankle to break it, but Clara stopped him. He was frozen in the air in his threatening position, on the precipice of murdering a man who was not supposed to die. The Doctor made a noise of pain and clamped her hands over her ears; Reapers. But this time Clara could hear them too. They must be flying around the pier above in the night sky. They had just minutes.

Clara could only ever teleport properly when she or someone she cared about was in grave danger; this was exactly one of those times. In a mirage of black smoke, she appeared in front of Baby-Faced Fletch and threw him backwards with a healthy helping of telekinesis, away from Fink.

"What's all this, Bertie?" he asked after he recovered from being winded, "Getting a girlie to fight your battles for ya?"

"Eh?" Albert Fink had no idea who Clara was or why she had just saved his life.

"Get away from him," Clara ordered the youthful gangster.

"Nice trick you've got, miss," said Baby, who was quite tall despite his young features. He couldn't even be eighteen yet, but he was tall enough that he had to stoop under that portion of the pier. Fink cowered on the floor behind Clara. "But it won't save you from me. I knows things, see. I knows you ain't supposed to be here." _How_ did he know that?

"I'm not sure you are, either, Finley," she said. Calling him by his name made his face contort in anger. He swiped the razor straight at her face but her reflexes were good enough that she phased in time: it sailed right through her head, didn't leave so much as a scratch. With a flick of her wrist the razor went flying from his hand, flinging itself towards one of the wooden columns and sticking itself in the wood.

"He ain't gonna be safe from me," Baby threatened, "No matter how far he runs from Brighton, I'll get him. Hear that, Fink? I'll get ya. I need yous dead, and it'll happen. Just like tonight, you won't see me coming, and you're not always gonna have some little girl to protect you."

"Little girl? Charming," Clara quipped. She forced him backwards with more telekinesis. The Doctor still not helping, she took drastic measures to put some real fear into this teen. He stopped being able to breathe, began clutching desperately at his throat and was lifted briefly off his feet. After inflicting this on him for ten seconds – which always felt like much longer in suffocating-time – Clara dropped him pathetically on the sand. He was furious now.

"You'll pay for this. You have no idea the things I can see or what danger you're in now, _Clara_." He retaliated to her naming him by throwing her own name right back at her – but she certainly had not mentioned that. He turned and fled, leaving Clara shocked and deflated and Fink still crying uselessly on the sand behind her. What did he mean about what he could 'see'?

"Did you hear that?" she glanced over at her wife, who had finally stood up and came slowly over. In the distance, the speck of Baby-Faced Fletch disappeared up the stairs back up towards the seafront. "He knew my name – how did he know that?" The Doctor watched him go but didn't answer. Clara shook her head, annoyed at the silence, and hastened to help Bertie Fink back to his feet. He was sweating and shivering, fully aware that he had been about to die.

"My wife's name is Clara," he said.

"Good name for a wife," the Doctor said absently, "Definitely a favourite of mine."

"Name or wife?" Clara asked.

"Both."

"What did he mean, sweetheart?" The Doctor was thinking.

"…1913. Martha and I ran from the Family of Blood, came to England, I hid as a human. But there was a boy there, at the school, Timothy Latimer. Sensed my real self, the one in the fob watch. Knew things about people and events without being told, all kinds of things. Had low-level telepathic abilities. But he was a hero, helped us all, helped save everyone, fought in the First World War and lived to be over a hundred and never even fired a bullet."

"Fletcher's a telepath?"

"Yeah. But he's malignant and misusing his gift, manipulating events so that he can shape the entire country in his image. Killing you must be the first step on his ladder," Thirteen turned to address Fink.

"Who are you? Why did you save me?" he asked them.

"I'm the Doctor, this is Clara. Long story short, you're not supposed to be murdered tonight. Or ever, in fact; if history goes the way it's _meant_ to then you'll live a long and happy life in suburban London with your two girls. If you let me, I should be able to hide you from him so he won't be able to track you down again, okay?"

"Let you? What you gonna do?"

"Just, trust me," she said, holding out her hands, "It won't hurt a bit." She smiled and put her hands on either side of his head, thumbs on his temples, ordering him to close his eyes. Clara, however, was distracted. She waded through the sea to take the razor out of the wooden pole, which she proceeded to fling out further into the ocean so that Baby wouldn't be able to come and retrieve it.

It didn't take long for Thirteen to shield Albert from any telepathic youths. He claimed not to feel any different and it took some persuading to get him to leave them and get on the first train out of Brighton. The Doctor ordered him to escape and avoid major cities for a while, at least a week but preferably two, because she suspected Baby-Faced Fletch had contacts everywhere who might be able to carry out his dirty work. They had to escort him back through the rain and up the stairs together before he finally got on an almost-empty train, one of the last of the night, to head out to whichever station was still running trains at that time. He actually waved to them as he disappeared down the tram tracks and into the night.

"Quick, show me the frontpage of the paper," Thirteen said as soon as they were alone. Clara took it out carefully, handing Clara the umbrella, but what they found was a shock. It was as though it were in a dream, letters and images distorted and jumbled up on the front page. She could have sworn some of the words were shifting and moving, too.

"How is that possible?"

"It's fluctuating," she said, "Time isn't fixed yet."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning we're going to have an extended stay in the swinging Sixties after all..."


	4. Brighton Rock - Chapter 4

_Brighton Rock_

 _4_

"Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey!" the Doctor shouted, throwing open the slightly mouldy, yellowing curtains to let what little sunlight there was that dreary morning shine into the boarding house bedroom they were renting for a meagre fee. It was after nine in the morning which, them being teachers, was a lot later than either of them usually stayed in bed. Not that the Doctor had slept a wink, oh no, she had been scheming, leaving Clara to her own, dreamy devices while she crept out in the early dawn to run a handful of nefarious errands. Clara certainly didn't appreciate being woken up. Out of a reflex she flailed her arm uselessly in the air to try and turn off her non-existent alarm clock. The Doctor seized the opportunity to grab her hand and tug on it gently to try and get her up. She groaned.

"It's five in the morning, Budd…" Clara complained.

"It's not. It's half-past-nine. We're got places to go, people to meet, things to see. Up and at 'em, cutie-pie." She clapped her hands over Clara's head; they really _did_ have somewhere they needed to be, though.

"Fine, fine, fine!" Clara hit at her hands, but then buried her head in the pillow and shut her eyes again. Thirteen cleared her throat and crossed her arms.

"I'm very sceptical about the last time those sheets have been washed." That did it. They had definitely slept in some bleak places in their time, and a working-class boarding house meant for poor tourists and students certainly wasn't the worst, but it was enough of a bad thought to get Clara to finally drag her sorry self out of the lumpy, sweat-stained bed.

"I hate you," she said, blinking in the sunlight and rubbing her eyes. She squinted at Thirteen and yawned, then asked, "Why are you so pretty today?"

"I've been out," she said, then she did a twirl in front of Clara, showing off a brand-new dress she had 'acquired'. "What do you think?" Clara stared at her, unaware her mouth was lolling open in her woozy stupor. "It's my new _Rear Window_ look, inspired by listening to Mika yesterday. Only, near the end of _Rear Window_. The climax. And purple. And less sheer. With more flowers. And I found some hairspray – it certainly wouldn't be the 1960s without hairspray. _Good morning Bri-igh-ton_ ," she sang for a moment, then cleared her throat, "Syllables don't really fit…"

"Don't get me wrong, I love the whole slutty-housewife, Betty Draper vibe – but you definitely didn't have that dress yesterday," Clara was blatantly suspicious, and with good reason.

"No, well, I mean…" she faltered, then indicated the back of a door where a second dress was hanging up, "I got you one, too."

"I was wearing one yesterday."

"But it got dirty from the rain, and it's bland."

" _Bland_?"

"I – it's fine – but we're going somewhere special today. Sort of. And we're on a tight schedule, so hurry up, make yourself presentable, there's some dry shampoo and cereal bars in the backpack."

"I thought we'd get a cooked breakfast at least…" Clara muttered.

"We'll have a fish supper to make up for it," the Doctor tried to placate her, though Clara did sometimes get very fixated on having a cooked breakfast. Something to do with her being English, Thirteen assumed. "Now come on, get dressed, it's Saturday morning and the races kick off at eleven."

"Oh. _Oh_. I cannot believe that the Doctor is dressing up for the races."

"Why not? I used to wear a suit every day, you know. Waistcoat, suspenders, tie – the whole shebang. It pays off to put the effort in every now and again," she defended herself. Just because she very rarely wore dresses did not mean she was particularly averse to them, she just shared her daughter's concerns for their impracticality. It was why she wouldn't be seen dead in high heels, and despite the dress was still wearing a pair of faded, pink Converse.

"They won't let you in without a fascinator," Clara said, rifling around in the bag to find the can of dry shampoo the Doctor had already used that morning. She dug it out eventually, and a hairbrush.

"It's not the Ascot, Coo. It'll be fine. I'll smile at them."

"Uh-huh," said Clara, unconvinced, going to stoop in front of a dirty mirror hanging by one screw on the wall, lopsided. "Why, exactly, did you decide to go shoplifting and drag me out to the races? I'm not a big fan of horseracing, you know. What if the police come after you?"

"It'll be fine. I took the dresses from the store room before anybody opened up. Didn't break anything. We can always return them. Maybe. Or at least give them the money."

"You? Money?" Clara questioned.

"I'm gonna place a bet. On a horse."

"Am I losing the plot? What've you been up to? Stealing dresses, placing bets?"

"Alright, _so_ ," she began, sitting down behind Clara on the foot of the bed, "I was thinking to myself last night when you went to sleep, why would Baby-Faced Fletch want to kill Bertie Fink? How does killing one sweaty, middle-aged family-man help him seize control of Brighton's criminal underworld and the country's infrastructure? If we understand that, we can understand how to stop him. So, while I was thinking about that, I remembered what I read in the article about his murder, the old version of today's paper. It said that Bertie Fink worked for the Golden Stalls."

Clara made a disgruntled face, "Sounds like a company who make toilets."

"It-? No! It's a bookmaker. Deals half in legitimate business, and half in… less-legitimate business. Operated from the top by Archie Speyer, who I told you yesterday was-"

"A friend of Dorothy?" Clara quipped wryly. The Doctor put her hands on her hips.

"Apart from that. War hero, crime boss, renegade entrepreneur – a capitalist, but I suppose I can forgive a little bit of capitalism here and there."

"Capitalism with a human face, eh?"

Thirteen laughed, "Good one. Like I said yesterday, after the war, Speyer began building a gambling ring throughout London and Brighton; Golden Stalls so named after the stalls on a racecourse. Golden because he's loaded thanks to a healthy combination of good horse breeding and illegal fixtures. Speyer is in control of Brighton's crime right now, Baby tries to kill one of Speyer's bookies the night before a seemingly unimportant race _but_ ," and now she picked up yet another newspaper, that morning's revamped copy of the _Argus_ with a headline about The Beatles allegedly playing the Palace Pier in summer (which they wouldn't), "If I flip to the sports section here it all becomes very suspect."

Clara stood up from the mirror and examined the page where the Doctor pointed it out to her; the odds for the eleven o'clock race that morning. She squinted, reading through them.

"What am I looking at? Which bit?"

"It's fixed, Coo. Today's race. That horse is called Depth Charge, odds submitted by Golden Stalls. And don't you remember I told you Archie Speyer is a war hero? 1944, _HMHS Victoria_ is bringing wounded soldiers back from Gibraltar and gets attacked by a German U-boat. Elsewhere, _HMS Ulysses_ is about to set off back into the Arctic Circle for another escort mission sending supplies to the Soviets on the Eastern front, but as a matter of urgency is sent down to the Bay of Biscay. However, this is the coast of occupied France, and the reason a U-boat was out there in the first place was protecting some Nazi construction site – who knows what they were doing, but they were there, in secret, along the route _HMHS Victoria_ was going to get home. But this is where it gets interesting; as the ship sank it drifted closer to France, ended up in a minefield. _Ulysses_ heads down there, _Victoria_ is right on the edge, and do you know what Midshipman Archibald Speyer did? He free-dove down there and defused the sea mine. Won too many medals count. Like I said, war hero.

"So, Baby-Faced Fletch figures that Speyer's fixing races, not so hard to work out when you're involved with the rackets too. Bertie Fink, the bookie, _knows_ which horse is fixed. Knows which horse to bet on. Tricky to figure out otherwise because, well, sea mines and depth charges are different things, and the odds aren't super-extraordinary. They're decent for an underdog, anyone following the sport will know that Depth Charge is pretty average but not likely to win. But someone who takes that gamble will come out on top, and I'll bet you Archie Speyer has money put on his own horse. Speyer will definitely be there, and he'll know who his competition is. He's our route to finding out about Baby and what makes him tick; he's working towards the future _we_ enjoy, against everything we saw in our alternate reality – which is still fluctuating, by the way."

"Yeah… okay, I get that, but why does finding out which horse in one measly race is fixed help anyone take over the city? We know which one's gonna win and it's not going to help us becoming criminal overlords."

"Oswald! _Back to the Future_! Marty McFly goes to 2015, gets the sports almanac. In 1955, old Biff gives teen Biff the almanac stolen from the DeLorean, Biff gets rich betting on races and turns Hill Valley into a crime-ridden, dystopic nightmare in 1985. He'll find out what the fixtures are, bet on them, make enough money to hire the man power to start stealing Archie's rackets out from under him. Organised crime 101. So, we're gonna high-tail it to the racecourse, put a pony on a horse, and psychic-paper our way up to the boxes to get a private meeting with one Mr. Speyer, the gay Vito Corleone of Britain's seaside. And we're gonna look super-cute while we do it. Sound good?"

"Forgive me for being too forward, but I think I want to marry you."

"Old girl's still got it. Who needs google? I'm a walking encyclopaedia."

"Mm, there's nothing sexier than a good page-turner. Zip me up." Throughout her explanation of why, precisely, they had to hurry to get to Brighton Racecourse for eleven o'clock that morning, Clara had actually succeeded in getting dressed somewhat quickly (for once.) The Doctor went to her aid and carefully helped her zip up the back of the dress. "I need a beehive, don't you think? You're looking a bit old-hat with the wavy blonde."

"Darling, wavy blonde is never going to go out of style. Beehives, on the other hand? Major faux pas. This is why nobody asks you for fashion tips. You've got a zit on your back, by the way."

"I do? Eurgh. I'm an elderly woman, I shouldn't be getting spots anymore," she complained, fixing her hair again. "Where's the makeup?"

"We didn't bring any makeup."

" _We didn't bring any makeup_? You expect me to believe that? You and your painted face?" Clara stared at her.

The Doctor shifted uncomfortably, "There's no time."

"Oh, I see, so _you_ get to wear makeup, but for me there's 'no time'?"

"What do you care? You look okay."

" _Okay_!?" That was not the right thing to say.

"We're in a rush!"

"To get to the races! I'm not going to the races without putting my face on, woman. Go and find me the eyeliner and some lipstick or you can stick your races up your-"

"Alright, already! Jeez! Women!" she shook her head, annoyed, and went to retrieve a handful of cosmetics she herself had been using that morning. "You know it's still basically fine for people to beat their wives in this decade?" she said when she handed Clara the products.

"I'll beat _you_ in a minute," Clara muttered, ignoring her in favour of the mirror.

" _Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eyes, And all my soul, and all my every part; And for this sin there is no remedy, It is so grounded inward in my heart_ ," the Doctor commented.

" _Methinks no face so gracious as is mine, No shape so true, no truth of such account_. _But when my glass shows me myself indeed, Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity, Mine own self-love quite contrary I read; Self so self-loving were iniquity_ ," Clara retorted. "You're not going to win a Shakespeare battle with the head of the English department, sweetheart."

"I really think you're contributing to the unrealistic expectations women have to deal with every day by your inability to go outside without a layer of paint."

"I'm _this close_ to throwing you out of the window. We're not going to be late. Feminism means I can wear whatever I want, and nobody can have a go at me about it. Including washed-up, old aliens."

"Whatever you say, Narcissus."

"How much money did you pickpocket to bet on this horse, anyway?"

"Four shillings, or thereabouts. Should get about a pound in returns. More than enough for you to have fish and chips later. Oh, I forgot – your phone kept going off in the night."

"Really? Who was it? Was it my sister? You should've woken me up."

"It was only Sarah. But at least her ability to actually send a text means the timelines still haven't been corrupted to their full extent… it's promising for us."

"Did she say anything juicy?"

"Screenshots of some message Kyle sent her. She was asking you what it meant."

"What did it say?"

"It was the word 'fancy' with a question mark."

Clara frowned, pausing while she applied her mascara for a moment, "How cryptic. Dunno why she likes him. I mean, she'd deny it if you asked, but she definitely does. _Personally_ , I don't think he has any redeeming character traits whatsoever. Then again, maybe I'm biased," she shrugged.

"Biased how?"

"Not everybody gets to marry someone as wonderful as you, I suppose," she said.

"I don't know. It's subjective, there's no scale."

"I just can't work out how much of that mutual-resentment thing they have going on is because of sexual repression or because they're incompatible. Maybe she has the right idea by being such a tease," Clara sighed. "Can't believe she was bothering me about that."

"In her defence, I didn't even know he knew how to send texts. It's a bit like getting something delivered by carrier pigeon. Although, I think he does keep those pigeons, doesn't he? You'd think _he_ was from the 1960s he's such a prude. And that's me saying that. I'm no Casanova."

"Marilyn Monroe would disagree."

"Very funny. Are you done with your colouring-in yet?"

" _Yes_ ," Clara said, glaring at her, "No need to be a dick."

"I wasn't – I just wanna meet this guy, okay? I have a lot of respect for Archie. And I'm concerned about what Baby might be up to. Could be scheming to kill some other poor schmuck for all we know. We gotta find out a way to get to him, stat." Clara didn't reply now, she went about putting her shoes on.

"Wish you stole some garters and stockings while you were out, it's a bit nippy today with that rain."

"Yeah, yeah, any excuse for garters with you." The Doctor crossed the room to start packing away what little remained of their things, very conscious of the time; she _was_ a Time Lord, after all.

"She was asking about you, actually. The other day."

"Who?"

"Sarah. And the arguing. Because you know how they argue all the time? She was asking me about _us_ arguing."

"Our banter?"

"Exactly. She's like, 'doesn't she make you want to strangle her sometimes?' and I was quite concerned by her saying that, so I didn't even make a joke. I said no, you're my wife and I adore you. I'm just very sceptical about the viability of that level of resentment before they've even admitted they like each other."

"They're probably bitter."

"Bitter?"

"Well, y'know. They're both kinda old. And still single," the Doctor shrugged, slinging the backpack over one of her shoulders the same point that Clara finally fixed her shoes and stood up. She retrieved the umbrella from where it had been propped up against the wall drying the previous night. "Got everything?"

"Uh… haven't got any pockets…" she muttered, "See? This is why I like my dress from the future. _Pockets_. Clothing revolution. Do you have my phone?"

"It's in this bag," said the Doctor, "Just like your keys, your receipts, your e-cigarette and your gum."

"Can I have the cigarette?"

"No. They haven't been invented yet."

"I'll just have to get some real cigarettes, then," Clara said, "I'm sure they're not that hard to find around here." The Doctor rolled her eyes. "Could I have the gum, at least?" Sighing, Thirteen unzipped the bag again (desperate to leave) and fished out Clara's chewing gum she took everywhere to deal with her nicotine cravings. She didn't even know if Clara was quitting at that moment or not, it seemed to change on a day to day basis.

"Can we go now?"

" _Yes_ , chill out," said Clara, opening the door, taking the keys out of the lock.

"I just don't want to get stuck in crowds of rowdy, drunken Brits."

"You're going to a race in Brighton on a Saturday in the 60s and you think you'll be able to avoid drunk Brits? I wish I had your optimism, sweetheart," Clara joked, smiling, holding the door open and then making sure to lock it behind them. The cheap boarding house really was quite squalid; narrow, wonky, rickety, it felt as though it was going to collapse at any moment because of loose screws or mildew – or perhaps even just disintegrating from the foot traffic it saw. But in a way, it did have character, which the Doctor always enjoyed.

The meek reception desk was still empty that time on the weekend, so Clara merely dropped the keys on it (having paid upfront late last night) and they went about their day, returning to the cloudy skies and the rain. She almost missed the climate-change-induced heat of 2064's late-May.

The streets already had a selection of race-goers middling about, dressed up as though they were guests at a wedding, all heading northwards just like the two of them. There was quite a bitter wind that morning which threatened to ruin the Doctor's perfectly-styled hair; she walked closer to Clara so as to stay underneath the umbrella.

"She asked me how I knew I wanted to marry you," Clara began. "Sarah, I mean. In the staff room a few weeks ago."

"Did you tell her you eloped without thinking?"

"No, I said you were such a good shag I couldn't let you go," she smirked. The Doctor was unconvinced.

"Really? You told her _that_?"

" _No_ , but I can't tell her the truth, that it was when I nearly died and you used your regeneration energy to heal me. That was when I knew I wanted to be with you forever. Plus, you did propose for real immediately afterwards. But sadly, Sarah has no idea that you're an alien."

"So why did she ask you that? Wanted to know if she subconsciously thinks Kyle is 'the one'?"

"What she needs to do," Clara began with the air of somebody who only _thought_ they knew what they were talking about, "Is just sleep with him and see if she still likes him afterwards."

"I really like your high moral fibre. She seems to ask a lot of questions about us, though…" A few more Vespas slid past in the cool rain, as well as a selection of vintage cars the Doctor loved to watch glide along in their own time period – completely unaware of what a novelty they were.

"I don't mean to brag, but I like to think we have a really great relationship. Don't you?"

"Of course I do!" Thirteen was offended that Clara even had to ask.

"She just wants to know what makes us tick."

"A thousand years of self-sacrifice, then fifty years of hard work, trauma, and commitment."

"Yeah," Clara nodded, "And the sex. That's the main one. Which is why she needs to shag Kyle."

"Not so sure, I heard a rumour from Ida that somebody is on the roster to be reprimanded for 'unprofessional conduct with a fellow member of staff' – and it's not either of us. She told me because she didn't want us to worry that we were in trouble, since she likes us. You know, because we make her tea a lot." Ida was the headmistress's secretary and head of the office staff.

"That's not about Kyle and Sarah," said Clara, "I heard a rumour from Freddy Howe-"

"What? In Year 10?"

"Yeah. I heard a rumour from _him_ , which he was very openly sharing with the rest of the class when they were meant to be doing joint essay plans, that somebody caught Terrance and one of the dinner ladies in the PE supply room."

"Oh my _god_. The plot thickens. I can't say I'm surprised. I wonder which dinner lady?"

"I don't know, but Freddy said it _wasn't_ the hot one."

"There's a hot one?"

Clara shrugged, "According to one hormonal fifteen-year-old boy, yes. He said she's a milf."

"Teenage boys think every woman under the age of forty is a milf."

"I think you're a total milf. But I honestly can't say I'm crushing on any of the dinner ladies, personally. I don't know that Terrance is particularly fussy about who he cops off with, though," Clara continued to gossip to fill the time walking towards the racecourse. "Besides, you're the one who always makes my lunch, I never eat in the canteen." Clara avoided hanging about in the canteen like the plague, constantly wary of the teenage boys who tried to talk to her if she stayed in there. "You're my personal dinner lady milf."

"Congratulations, Clara, you've just won the award for the least sexy thing anybody has ever said."

"Ooh, what do I win?"

"A new wife who can stand you."

"This new wife better be Terrance's dinner lady side-piece. Otherwise I'll be seeing you in court for a _very_ messy divorce."

"The PE supplies room smells gross, I don't know _how_ they could be getting up to anything in there. And it's dirty. Plus, how old is Terrance?"

"Forty-something."

"Eurgh, this is putting the worst image into my brain. How are any of these people qualified to teach in a school? _I'm_ not qualified to teach in a school and I have a hot wife who also works in said school, and I still wouldn't lower myself to the _PE supply room_ ," the Doctor said, turning her nose up at the thought. It was getting a bit windier now, a slight chill biting at their skin. "It wouldn't even take me half as much effort for me to get you to take your clothes off as it must have taken _him_ to trick that dinner lady."

"Hey, I'm a professional. I can resist your wiles for long enough during the school day, especially if my job's at risk."

"Not true. What about the time there was that special assembly because there was the guest speaker, and we had two hours free, so we snuck out in the car and-"

"Yeah, alright, maybe that _did_ happen, _once_ , but we were not on school premises."

"And we didn't get caught."

"That's not that main thing." The Doctor shrugged; _she_ thought it was the main thing. "It really shouldn't happen again."

"Oh, come on. Don't you wanna feel young?" she asked wryly, the bustling racecourse looming ahead of them now. Not as big a crowd as the Doctor had been anticipating, "Bunking off school to get lucky in the middle of the afternoon?"

" _Maybe_ it was fun, but it's not necessary. We have a nice house and a nice bed-"

"And briefly we also had a nice Ferrari."

"Yeah – I wouldn't necessarily advise screwing someone in a sports car, I did get cramp in my leg."

"Urgh. Why do you only ever remember the bad stuff?"

"Someone has to be there to stop you from doing something stupid more than once, sweetheart," Clara said, "Like that time you nearly fell off Tower Bridge into the river a few years ago. I'm not having you drown on me twice in a row."

"And yet, here we are, living in our cushy, domestic little world right on the coast."

"Where I keep a very close eye on you."

"And here I just thought you fancied me."

"Not remotely. You're just naïve."

"Glad we've cleared that mess up."

"You better get out the psychic paper," Clara prompted. They had drawn right up to the racecourse now, which was closer to the town centre than their actual house was in the future (which hadn't been built yet.) Clara carefully holding the umbrella, the Doctor searched through the backpack, taking her turn to lament the lack of pockets in feminine, mid-century day-ware.

"I do love it here, though," she said, retrieving the battered, black wallet.

"In Brighton?"

"In the 60s. '64. Good year. Beatles mania, Mod aesthetics, counter-culture, Civil Rights – it's my _jam_. Let's swing by London on the way home and maybe catch a protest against the Vietnam War."

"We can't go to a protest, we haven't got any Pepsi," Clara joked.

"I'm serious, though. I feel a real kind of… affinity. Do you know what I mean?"

Clara shrugged, "I suppose _I_ feel a bit of an affinity for, I don't know, 2004?"

"2004?"

"Lost my virginity in 2004. And it's when Britney Spears released 'Toxic' as a single."

"Of course _that's_ the year you pick."

"2013 is _okay_ , I suppose." The year they had met.

"I'm glad you think that the most important year in our lives is 'okay.'"

"Don't make me choose between you and Britney. It's Britney every time. Besides, we can't go to a big anti-war protest, what if we got photographed? You're _teaching_ the Vietnam War this term. How would it look if one of the kids finds a picture of us dating back to 1960-something holding big 'make love not war' placards?"

"It would totally look like we have our priorities in order!" Thirteen argued, "And there's plenty of pictures of us from all over the shop. We're darn lucky none of the kids _have_ found any yet."

"Esther's good at her job, what can I say?" said Clara. For fifty years Esther Drummond had been their personal cyber-security detail, still paid a generous salary courtesy of the eternal billionaire Adam Mitchell. "You _did_ spend a lot of time in the 60s when you were younger," Clara, who sometimes seemed to recall more about the Doctor's life than the Doctor herself, said. "Didn't, uh, whatshername – your granddaughter – she hung about in the 60s, yeah? And didn't you get trapped here for ages working for UNIT?"

"Susan," said the Doctor, "And I suppose you're right." The details of that period were quite foggy to her now.

"Could just seem familiar. The TARDIS is a 1960's phone box, after all. With an old-fashioned telephone in the door."

"I'm a sucker for retro vibes."

Getting into the racecourse was easier than the Doctor had anticipated. They weren't even asked for the psychic paper; she supposed that if they didn't look as though they were going to start any riots, they would be allowed through the gates (to that effect, she spied a group of leather-clad bikers loitering nearby with a collection of flashy motorcycles to counter the scooters of the Mods.)

"Rejected _Wild One_ extras over there," she said quietly to Clara as they shuffled through the crowds into the race course.

"Police milling about yet again," Clara said, noticing a handful of bobbies in the area. "And – oh wow – speak of the devil," she pointed something out and smirked. A bright blue police box standing near the mouth of the race course with a bored copper leaning against it.

"The one time the TARDIS would actually blend in on the street, and the timelines are too fragile to bring her down. Oh, the irony," she joked, "Now, then… which is the bit where all the rich people hang out here?"

"Top of the stands, with the function rooms," Clara said, "Out of the rain and the cold. That, or with the jockeys and horses. If he owns the horse, he'll be allowed down wherever they keep them. I think. What do you reckon? Stables or stands?"

"Uh… not sure… what do you think?"

"I was just asking you what _you_ think."

"Okay… escalating gang violence, risk of riots, sensitive race, tons of police who I don't _think_ he pays off… must be in the stands. For this one, at least."

"Then that's this way," Clara grabbed her elbow and pulled her off to the left, out of the stream of people heading towards the stairs into the wooden, damp stands and towards a door into the underside of the seats. This area, too, had a decent amount of people, all there to place bets on the horses. Clara was finally able to closer the umbrella as they headed towards a cordoned-off area with a pair of clean-cut but sketchy-looking young men on either side; bouncers, it must be. Gangsters from Speyer's crew making sure nobody intruded upstairs. "Alright, we're gonna say that you're a rich, American heiress looking to invest a ridiculous amount of money in horseracing, alright?"

"We're – what?"

"Say you're a Vanderbilt."

"I hate the Vanderbilts, I've met them. Horrible people."

"Then I guess you're a horrible person, look – you're a lesser-known, Vanderbilt cousin who's just been given access to your trust fund looking to spend it all on something rebellious and outrageous."

"Then who are _you_?"

" _I_ am your… I don't know, assistant, or something. I drive you around and get you coffee."

"Oh, you mean like in real life?"

"Shut up. Go on," Clara nudged her in the small of her back. She sighed and took out her psychic paper, approaching the two sharp-suited guards. As soon as they spied her, they looked sceptical.

"I'm looking for who's in charge around here," she said, trying to produce an air of class and self-importance – which she was not very good at.

"Oh, aye? In charge of what, miss?" the taller of the two asked. The other was not paying much attention, keeping his eyes on the people placing bets, looking for trouble. Clara lingered at her elbow looking relatively cute and harmless.

"I'll cut a long story short; I'm looking to invest some money, thought I'd visit Britannia and turn a meagre couple-million dollars into a small fortune. Something to keep you warm through the winter, you know? But my family, see – who I can't really name, but I'll tell you they have a long history with the railroads – have a nose for business. Your bets are just chump-change compared to what I could be making if I was pointed in the direction of your shot-caller. Train a few horses, maybe build a few restaurants – I don't know if you've heard of the McDonalds', but they're looking to make waves in the next few years. Cross-continental expansion. Burgers for the common man. I'm friends with Ray Kroc."

"You said you have a few million dollars you want to funnel into businesses _here_?"

She scoffed, "Only if there's enough business to be had. I've heard a few rumours about Eastbourne having a lot of potential…"

"You don't wanna go to Eastbourne, miss…?" he prompted her for her name.

"Stephanie Vanderbilt. Oh, shoot – I wasn't supposed to say the 'Vanderbilt' part…"

" _Vanderbilt_? I, erm… the boss will want to see you."

"Of course he does. And my maidservant, of course," she indicated Clara, "I don't go anywhere without her. Who else is gonna clean the mud off my shoes?" Clara just smiled.

"He's in a meeting. You'll have to wait outside for him to finish. But best you're up there than down here, Miss Vanderbilt."

"Technically it's _Lady_ Vanderbilt, thanks to some tactful marriages just before the war. But you're good. I'm glad you've made the right decision; I'm sure you'll be rewarded for your initiative. Come along now, you." They lifted the chain from across the private stairs up into the rooms above the stands and let Clara and the Doctor passed, Clara smiling sweetly at them as she did.

"Your _maidservant_ who _cleans your shoes_?" Clara hissed once they were out of earshot, ascending the narrow steps in single-file.

"You did clean my shoes two weeks ago," the Doctor pointed out to her.

"I was just cleaning all the shoes…" Clara mumbled. "Is Stephanie Vanderbilt a real person?"

"If my knowledge of the big business family trees holds up, no. I pulled that one right out of my butt."

"Nice. And nice butt, too."

"Thank you kindly."

The Doctor had been right about one thing; Brighton Racecourse was certainly no Epsom Downs. The upstairs VIP area wasn't the kind of place you went to hobnob with the snobs and had only one meagre function room with a rusty dumbwaiter in the corner intended for lower-middle-class weddings or the wakes of seasoned gamblers. A tattered pool table stood in the corner. There were sounds coming from a poorly-labelled meeting room on the left-hand side.

"Business meeting…" she muttered to herself, making a beeline for the door. Clara grew distracted by the windows aimed at the racecourse below, people gathering along the track to watch the horses. The race was supposed to be starting shortly, at eleven o'clock on the dot.

Thirteen had made a lot of mistakes in her life. Leading various alien hoards to attempt to conquer planet Earth; losing her companions through stupid follies and schemes she hadn't thought through properly; putting one of Clara's favourite dildos in the dishwasher where it melted – the usual. But this one _really_ took the cake, as she barged in on two men (one of whom was Archibald Speyer) fornicating in the meeting room. Archie sat in a chair with an expression of pure bliss on his face, smoking a cigarette, while someone younger knelt in front of him. The Doctor was mortified, and though she didn't really _see_ anything, she saw enough that the image was going to be burned into her brain forever, retrograde amnesia be damned.

"Just give me five minutes," Archie didn't even open his eyes as he waved her away, perhaps assuming she was just one of his underlings. Silently, she left, closing the door. Clara was still looking out at the track while the Doctor was frozen in place.

"What's wrong?" Clara asked, "Is he busy?"

"Oh, he's definitely busy…" she said, crossing her arms tightly and shuffling away from the door.

"…What?" Clara implored, "Are you alright?"

"…It's not that I'm a prude, okay? I'd just like some _warning_ before… and here I thought walking in on you watching that kind of thing in the bathtub was bad enough…"

"Is he screwing someone in there?" Clara lowered her voice.

"Oh, he's, erm… he's…"

"Just say it, sweetheart."

"He's getting head."

"Good for him. Wish I was getting head right now," she turned to wistfully look out of the window some more, "I'm sure he'll be done soon. Boys don't last long. If that was us in there, on the other hand-"

"Oh, god…"

"It'd be like, can you go catch a film and come back in a few hours?"

"Ha, ha."

"Bring us some popcorn while you're there."

"I could go for some popcorn… can you believe he's not watching the race?"

"I don't think I'd care much about some race if I was getting sucked off," Clara shrugged, indifferent, "Can't believe you walked in on that. That's _hilarious_. I can't wait to tell my sister."

"Great…"

"Did you see much?"

"No, his head was kind of blocking the, uh… 'main event.' Not that I was looking."

"What do you think of racing, anyway? You forgot to place your bet."

The Doctor shrugged, "Can always pickpocket some more cash. I'm sure we can get dinner with four shillings – there's no overfishing crisis causing seafood prices to rise way back when. It's all locally sourced and in abundance. But horseracing? I, uh… I mean, horses are designed to be good at running. It's natural selection. But I guess, on the other hand, they do tend to, y'know, _die_ during races. Or if they suffer any kind of leg injury they get shot – which is kind of fair enough because it's really _super_ difficult to heal a broken horse leg. I guess I don't have much of an issue with it on principle, but it can lead to potentially fatal extremes."

"How do they even, like, fix races?" Clara inquired, still observing the crowds through the window, "I've never understood that."

"Pay off jockeys, drug rival horses, drug your own horse to make it go fast – I don't know, the same ways you fix any kind of sporting event. Oughta ask Jenny, she's the mobster. Probably knows the ins and outs of how to run a successful gambling ring."

"You must be so proud," Clara quipped.

"That's the word…" Thirteen muttered. She glanced back at the door to the meeting room. "Do you think the guys downstairs know what he's up to?"

"Maybe. Who knows?"

"He didn't seem super fussed about being walked in on. Didn't even open his eyes. Just said 'give me five minutes.'"

"Must be getting a bloody good seeing to."

Eventually, the meeting room door opened and the young man who had been kneeling hurried out.

"Terribly sorry about that," he mumbled on his way past. He burped, and the Doctor thought she wanted to curl up and die. And then Archie himself came swaggering out with a fresh cigarette between his teeth, his trousers held up by suspenders, but the fly still completely unbuttoned. It was like living with Captain Jack Harkness again. In fact, she would bet a fair amount of the change in her possession that Jack and Archie had 'liaised' at least once. At least he had his underpants on. He frowned when he saw them.

"You don't work for me. Who let you up here?"

"Oh, we just snuck in," said the Doctor, "To have a word."

"Snuck in? With the police crawling around out there? What's this word about? What I do within the privacy of my own… publicly-owned racecourse… is my business."

"Oh, we're definitely not with the police, and we're here to talk about business," said the Doctor, "We're not gonna get you in trouble for _that_."

"We're together," Clara interjected, trying to ease the atmosphere, "Me and her. Practically married. Even bought rings."

"Oh, really?" he said, then smiled and sat down in one of the many chairs in the function room, putting his feet up on the table and blowing out a stream of cigarette smoke, "Couple of perverts after my own heart, then?"

"Something like that," said Clara, transfixed by the cigarette.

"Two lesbians looking to talk to me about business during an important race of my season. Well. Don't ever let it be said that I'm not a good host – I've got some champagne up here. Would either of you care for a cigarette?" he took a packet out of his trouser pocket, a packet of Marlboros no less – Clara's brand of choice. And they didn't even have any gory pictures on them.

"Yes please," Clara said immediately, losing all semblance of willpower in the face of an actual, lit cigarette. It was one thing trying to quit in a hundred years' time – hardly anybody smoked anymore in the 2060s, and certainly not the faculty of a school in the country's most liberal city – but in that decade, it wasn't even ten years since the first studies linking smoking to cancer had been released. _Everybody_ smoked. And now Clara had fallen off the wagon again. Thirteen didn't even consider trying to argue with her about it as she gladly took a cigarette from Archie, who lit it on the end of his own. Clara's face became a mask of relief.

"Do you know Albert Fink? Bertie? Personally?" the Doctor asked Archie, who narrowed his eyes.

"Funny. Midnight last night, Bertie gives me a bell from a phone box and says someone just tried to carve him underneath the pier when two birds saved his life. He's a mathematician, we met during the war. He was just a seaman, but he had a knack for poker. He does most of my odds."

"Your odds on Depth Charge?" the Doctor asked. Archie laughed.

"Who are you?"

"I'm the Doctor. This is Clara. Practically my wife, like she said. And you're right, it was us who saved Bertie Fink. The kid who tried to kill him is dangerous. He's trying to take over your rackets and Bertie's the way to do that."

"And why should I believe you?"

"Because we want what's best for the city," the Doctor said, "You must know something about the run who's trying to move in on your territory. We'll go deal with him for you."

"You? 'Deal with him'?"

"We're more than capable," said Clara, smoking. "We snuck up here, didn't we?"

"That you did. But why don't you tell me what you know first?"

"It's some up-and-comer called Finley Fletcher, Baby-Face," Clara said, "He wants to control Brighton and make it into some gangland hell on earth. We just need to know how to find him."

"He wants to find someone who can tell him which horses to bet on so that he can get rich and muscle you out of Brighton and London," the Doctor continued, "But Clara and I live a pretty swell life down here by the coast – less questions asked about our 'lifestyle choices', as I'm sure you're aware. We know the kid has… different views. Wants to remodel the whole city to fit with his agenda and ruin it."

"I didn't consider him much of a threat."

"Well, obviously, that works to his advantage. You're underestimating him, _and_ us," said Thirteen, "We want to help stop him, but all we really know is his name. What really need to know is how to find him, so we came to look for you hoping you'd have at least _some_ handle on your competition."

"And what do you want in return for your 'help'?"

"Nothing. Just for Brighton to carry on being a great place to live, I guess," said the Doctor, "Good deeds are their own reward. Plus, I'm kind of a fan of yours – I've heard about how you defused that sea mine in the war."

" _Ah_ – so that's how you worked out which horse is the lucky one," he said, nodding, "You've done your research."

"You're a hero. And you're helping people. Helping Britain through its golden age. I'm a fan – hence why I, uh, don't live in the States anymore…" She still sometimes forgot to come up with some excuse or reason for her accent. "I know you have the best interests of the people at heart. Just help us get rid of Fletcher to stop him going after Bertie."

"…Well. I suppose I owe you girls one, for saving his life yesterday to begin with. And with the threat of riots at the moment, I can't really spare the manpower to deal with it myself."

"I'm sure you're a big fan of 'manpower', eh?" Clara joked. He looked at her.

"You're embarrassing us," the Doctor told her. "Just… smoke your cigarette." Clara glared at her but took another drag regardless.

"It's not on me if Baby carves you, though. Let's get that clear. Anything happens, it's not my fault. You asked for this."

"Sure thing," the Doctor waved away his concerns.

"I don't know an awful lot. He stays in the shadows. All I've heard is that he has a girl. There was a heist a few weeks ago, nobody involved with me, but I've got a bobby on my rotating schedule-" of men he slept with, the Doctor realised, "-and he says something about them trying to convince the girl to testify to make a connection between the boy and a small-time bank robbery a few weeks ago. But the police haven't made any progress with her, and they don't have enough evidence to charge him without someone grassing. The girl's your way in, if you can get more out of her than the police."

"That's good, because I've found my way into a lot of girls," Clara said.

"Could you stop? What's the matter with you?" the Doctor snapped. Then she figured it out – Clara clearly thought Archie was hot. She was doing that nervous, awkward thing she usually kept bottled up unless the likes of Sally Sparrow or Fyn Kyris were about. Fyn was also tall, dry-humoured, and incredibly gay. Typical Clara. "I'm sorry about her. She's not always so… urgh." Clara was hardly even listening. "Who's this girl?"

"First name's Lily. She's a waitress, in Cathy's. It's a greasy spoon a stone's throw from the pier. She knows more than she thinks, but she's loyal as a dog. Supposedly they're getting married, and then the coppers definitely won't be able to arrest him for anything. Can't force a wife to testify against her husband in court."

"Lily, Cathy's, near the pier, gotcha," the Doctor nodded, tapping Clara's shoulder, "Thanks for the information. We'll be sure to get out of your hair now."

"I'd appreciate it. I've got another meeting after this race," he said wryly. Another hook-up, more like. It was a miracle Archie found any time at all to run his criminal empire when he was getting laid so much.

"C'mon, Coo," the Doctor picked up her bag again. Clara didn't move. "I said, _come on, Coo_." Nothing. " _Clara!_ " she poked Clara in the side of her face. "We're leaving to go bother a heterosexual waitress."

"I suppose when you put it _that_ way," Clara said, though she stumbled slightly when she got out of her chair, "Thanks for the cigarette. I'm much obliged."

"Yeah, yeah," said the Doctor, "You're such an embarrassment, honestly." She dragged Clara out of the room.

"Bye!" Clara smiled brightly and waved at Archie, who only raised his hand in return, shaking his head at them and lighting another cigarette. But at least he had helped, and at least they had a lead. It was back to the seafront for them now.


	5. Brighton Rock - Chapter 5

_Brighton Rock_

 _5_

They stole out of the rain and into Cathy's Tea Room. While they had been walking back into town from the racecourse the weather had increased tenfold, a severe storm rolling in from the choppy, grey sea and attacking the buildings with bullet-like water droplets. Clara shook out the umbrella and left it in the stand by the door while the Doctor drifted over to find a table, one nestled warmly into a corner right by a rattling, old radiator. Thunder rolled outside; it was dark and dreary despite being barely noon. Clara would have believed it if somebody told her it was eight o'clock at night. There were small, cardboard menus on the table which Clara picked up to peruse once she had sat down, the Doctor trying to find her change.

"You didn't bet on the horse in the end, then?" Clara asked, though they had stuck around long enough to find out that Depth Charge _had_ won the race, meaning the Doctor had been correct.

"Felt like cheating," she shrugged, "And I don't wanna pull a Biff Tannen."

"You'll pickpocket people, but you won't gamble. How interesting," Clara mused jokingly.

"I'm a complicated gal."

It had a nice atmosphere in Cathy's Tea Room. Clara was an enormous fan of tea rooms and cafés herself, the hearty home-cooking and the endless supply of tea. Some of her favourite memories of her time with the Doctor happened to be, bizarrely enough, on low-key dates of theirs to cafés and whatnot. Endlessly travelling the universe, the places they'd been, people they'd met, things they'd done – and idle afternoons spent escaping the rainy weather in humid eateries like Cathy's were her fondest recollections. Maybe it was a testament to the strength of their relationship, or something like that.

"Ooh, they do smoked kippers here."

"Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast," the Doctor quipped; Clara laughed.

"Halfway between a fish supper and a full English, I am _winning_. And it costs, uh… what's that?" she held the menu out to the Doctor. "It says 3D."

"No, it's – threepence. That's what it means. Don't you worry your pretty head about all these numbers, Coo. I know you don't understand them," she took the menu, trying to work out what she wanted herself, while Clara glared at her. She glanced up. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Oh, for – _that's_ too rude? That's your limit? Patronising you about your ineptitude when it comes to mathematics? An ineptitude I've been subjected to for decades?" the Doctor questioned. "We both know you can hardly manage post-decimal currency, Clara. I bet you don't even know how many pennies are in a pound in 1964."

"Like… seventy?"

"No."

"Well… it's like, ten shillings, right? A pound?"

"Nope."

Clara paused. "…Whatever. What's the answer?"

"Two-hundred-and-forty pennies in a pound. Twenty shillings in a pound, twelve pennies in a shilling, and then there's half-pennies and farthings – which is a quarter of a penny. Then there's sixpences and crowns, which are five shillings. Ten shillings is half a sovereign, a guinea is a pound and ten shillings. The 'd' on the menu stands for _denarius_ , in a throwback to old, Roman currency." Clara stared at her. "And now you see why they have Decimal Day in 1971 and make everything into nice multiples-of-ten. Just wait until they introduce credits. Then there's just one credit and no other denominations. Nothing less than a credit, no name for a value of credits higher than one credit. Easy-peasy."

"Uh-huh. That might be the most boring thing you've ever said to me."

"You asked!"

"Do you ever put the kids to sleep in lessons?"

"They fall asleep in your mock exams," the Doctor grumbled. Clara was annoyed by that, mostly because a few kids _had_ fallen asleep in her mock exams.

Rain pattered against the dark windows as the conversation died out; the glass panes were foggy and soaked on the other side, making it difficult to see anything clearly except for bloated, vintage cars, distorted by the water and gliding past on a blurry road. She drank in the smell of the coffee and the second-hand cigarette smoke flooding the room and rising to the stained ceilings in patches and clumps. Around half the chairs and tables were occupied, the soft buzz of conversation providing a source of comfort in their fluctuating situation.

"This time yesterday we were in an almost identical type of café, only a hundred years in the future," Clara said, "Feels like a lot longer…"

"I love them. If you wanna know exactly what kind of place you're in, the local café is the place to be. Or the pub. Depending on what time of day it is. Some of our favourite dates have been in cafés," she said, still eyeing the menu. The Doctor glanced up and caught Clara smiling warmly at her. "What?"

"I was just thinking the same thing, that's all. About our dates."

"Aren't we cute." A waitress came gliding over promptly, after they had chatted and perused the menu for barely a few minutes. Clara always felt a tremendous pressure to decide what she was going to eat in such a short period of time. But it was the Doctor who was holding them up, for once; Clara asked for her smoked kipper and a pot of tea, while it took Thirteen a bit longer of eyeing the menu to finally decide to throw all caution to the wind and order _two_ cooked breakfasts as well as a coffee. All for herself.

"You want _two_?" the waitress questioned her.

"Yep."

"You know that's double of everything?"

"Sure do."

"And you're gonna eat it all yourself?"

"Oh, I'll have a slice of her toast," Clara said. The waitress was still unconvinced. "Honestly, she will eat it all. She's like a hoover, just inhales food. It's alarming." The Doctor only smiled, and the waitress decided she didn't care much about questioning their eating habits any longer. She sighed and rolled her eyes and then wrote the order on her notebook. Her name-tag betrayed her as Tara, not the Lily they were looking for. There was always the possibility that she wasn't working that Saturday, Clara supposed.

"I'm _ravenous_. No dinner, no supper, no breakfast – the hunger pangs are _this close_ to throwing me into a swoon," the Doctor complained, holding up her thumb and forefinger to Clara.

"Wish I had something to read…" Clara pondered, "Sick of newspapers, though. Sick of reading about what might or might not have happened on May 30th, 1964."

"We need to think of a plan," Thirteen said.

"And here I thought you wanted us to have a nice, relaxing holiday."

"Well. You know me," she said wryly, then lowered her voice, "Now, then. If the police can't convince this girl to turn on lover-boy, what tricks do you think _we_ can play? Aside from your go-to tactic of trying to seduce her."

"If this sociopathic teenager can get her wrapped around his finger, I'm sure _I_ can manage it."

"We don't even know how old she is. And it's crawling with police out there. All she has to do is shout and everybody's gonna mob the twenty-something 'invert' trying to lure a bona fide schoolgirl into her bed."

"Yeah, alright," Clara muttered, "So no flirting? Because insecure, working-class straight girls are my speciality."

"You know, you're not supposed to live up to the 'predatory lesbian' cliché, Coo. Just because this is the 1960s doesn't mean you have to embody all the negative stereotypes of period pulp fiction."

"I _love_ period pulp fiction."

"Clearly. Look, we'll just play it safe, okay? There are other ways to get people to spill the beans."

"I don't know. Teenagers in love do tend to think that the whole world is against them. I remember when _I_ was that young, I probably wouldn't have rolled over on someone I was seeing to the police. And I certainly wouldn't give you up to the feds." They were talking relatively quietly, and nobody was bothered with listening to them, even given the fact they weren't being quite as careful as they should be talking about the private facets of their sexualities.

"I guess not…" the Doctor mused, thinking. She regressed into silence now, while Clara continued to wonder about if they had brought any books with them. Shortly thereafter Tara their waitress returned with tea and coffee to Clara's great relief. There was nothing she wanted more than a good cup of tea. She gave herself an extra sugar cube to make up for the chaos of the previous day, thinking about how interesting it was that she was suddenly more comfortable talking about being gay in 1964 than she had been in 2064 for a handful of hours.

"Okay, so," Clara began, stirring her tea, "Police interrogation tactics aren't as technical as they are where we're from right? They don't have the same knowledge or methods."

"But neither do we. We're not trained detectives. And the timeline is still too fragile to call down my trained-detective daughter," the Doctor pointed out.

"Well… the police want to know about some bank heist, right?"

"Uh-huh."

"But we don't."

"Nope."

"We just need to know where to find this boy, we can take it from there ourselves," Clara continued, "So… hm. We could, y'know – _kidnap_ her?"

" _What?_ First you want to sleep with her, now you wanna kidnap and question her. What's next? Waterboarding?"

"Waterboarding _does_ get good results."

"We're not in Guantanamo Bay, Oswald. You can't just go around waterboarding random waitresses. Look – maybe there's something in your seduction tactics. Though it's been a long time since you've had to utilise them," the Doctor said. They were going in circles with no solid ideas between them.

"My seduction tactics are nowhere near as malicious as you think. You just have to be nice and a smooth-talker. Funny, clever, lend an ear. Subtle. Talk about boys."

" _Boys_? You seduce women by talking about _boys_?"

"Listen, they're proven methods. You just have to do what you do when you talk to anybody – find common ground, shared interests, shared complaints and problems."

"And that's it?" she asked incredulously, "That's your big secret?"

"I think it helps that I'm hot," Clara shrugged, indifferent, drinking more tea and letting her eyes wander to the murky windowpane again. The Doctor shook her head, displeased.

"You're like one of those awful guys who thinks that by being nice to women they're entitled to sex."

"That's not true, I like to think I'm always nice," Clara defended herself, "Or I always try to be nice, at least. And contrary to my heinous reputation, the majority of people in the world have not lowered themselves to sleeping with me."

Thirteen leant back in her chair and crossed her arms, sticking her feet out until they were practically underneath Clara's chair opposite. They both grew hungrier by the second.

"…Far-cry from hunkering down for GCSEs, huh?"

"Tell me about it. Maybe it puts it into perspective a bit."

"Puts what into perspective?"

"You being right about me worrying too much about the kids. I mean, there is only so much we can do. Besides, if one unruly teenager can change the course of British history for the worst, I'm sure that group of rowdy sixteen-year-olds can remember half a dozen quotes from _Catcher in the Rye_."

" _That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are_ ," the Doctor did her surliest Holden Caulfield.

"I'll tell you about girls," said Clara, "They're phoney." The Doctor laughed.

"I'm sure they'll do swell in their exams. Even teenage boys find _Catcher in the Rye_ a riot."

"A _rye_ -ot," Clara reiterated.

"God, you're the worst human being in the world."

"I don't even like it. I wanted to set _The Bell Jar_."

"You can't make them all read _that_ for their exams, they'll kill themselves. They're already all emotionally warped and hormonal. Puberty does those kinds of things to you."

"That's what Tom said. But _The Bell Jar_ is just _Catcher in the Rye_ but, like, better. Anyway, he put up enough of a fight about it that I gave in and let him do Salinger. He's very passionate about it. Gave me bargaining tools to set _The Crucible_ for Year Thirteen's coursework," Clara explained. She was sure Thirteen already _knew_ what texts she had set for what year, but they did often get caught up in their separate departments. She herself wasn't too clear on the specifics of the History syllabus, though.

" _The Crucible_ is not historically accurate."

"Here I thought you'd be all over a literary metaphor for the red scare. And obviously we can't forget that Arthur Miller was briefly married to that old flame of yours, Marilyn Monroe."

"I just don't like the way it portrays Abigail Williams."

"I _love_ the way Winona Ryder portrays Abigail Williams," Clara said snidely.

"She was, like, twelve in real life. I'm starting to worry that you don't have some kind of sinister disposition over here, Coo."

"You're forgetting that I almost did get hanged for witchcraft in Salem."

"So why would you want to relive those memories by teaching some kids about it for a year?" the Doctor questioned. Clara didn't really have a good answer. "What are you thinking of setting for next year, anyway? Fresh lot of sixth formers to disillusion."

"Ha, ha. And I don't know. I'm in a spat with Tom about it."

" _You're_ the head of department."

"Yes, well, he's very passionate about books. It's a good quality for an English teacher to have. Besides, I think he's still a bit miffed that Lorna made _me_ department head and not him. He's trying to get me to set _Cat on a Hot Tin Roof_ for the coursework. He's dying to do some Williams for the play."

"And what do you want?"

" _I'm_ lobbying for _The Importance of Being Earnest_ , but Tom doesn't like Wilde and says _Earnest_ has 'no substance.' I think it's got _heaps_ of substance."

"And gay subtext."

"Yeah, well, _Hot Tin Roof_ also has a plentiful supply of that. Only angrier. Forgive me if I choose Cecily Cardew and cucumber sandwiches over Maggie Pollitt and the southern grotesque," Clara muttered, then she spied plates of food making their way through the tables in the careful possession of Tara. She managed to carry both of the Doctor's enormous Full Englishes, while Clara's kipper was small-fry by comparison.

"Excuse me," Clara stopped Tara as she made to leave the table, "Is there a waitress here called Lily?"

"What's this about?" Tara asked seriously, "There've been a lot of people in here asking after her lately."

"I'm her cousin," Clara lied, "Our grandfather recently died, see, but my mother – her aunt – misplaced the name and address to telegram to about the funeral arrangements. She's flighty like that."

"Dead grandfather, as well as everything else what's been going on with her?"

"Everything like what?" Clara continued. The Doctor was already wolfing down her food, piercing the sunny egg yolk with the end of a sausage; she hadn't even picked up the cutlery.

"Oh, I dunno. She's got some feller. I seen him lurking in here once."

"Really? What's he look like?" Clara asked. Tara was a gossip, which worked in their favour.

"Tall-ish. But young. Weird scar. I told her I don't like the look of him, none of the girls do, but she wouldn't listen. Screamed at us. And normally she's so quiet… but if you're her family, maybe you can talk some sense into her."

"It'd be my pleasure, if he's as shifty as you say," Clara smiled, "Is she working today? This is gonna sound funny, but I haven't seen her since we were small. I'm from up north."

"Oh. She's the mousy one, in the back right now, smoking on her break. Looks a bit sick, Cathy worries she's not eating properly. I've got other tables…"

"Sorry for keeping you. Thanks for the help." Tara went off again. Thirteen was still demolishing her lunch. "Could I have some of your toast, do you reckon?" The Doctor's mouth was full, so instead of answering she just picked up a slice and gave it to Clara. Fish and toast was a funny combination, but not one she minded.

They didn't talk for the next few minutes, the Doctor much too engaged with her food and Clara scanning the room every few seconds to try and spot this 'mousy' Lily they were after. It began filling up in Cathy's Tea Room as people began arriving for the lunch time rush, angling to get out of the worsening storm. The wind had picked up severely and the windows rattled now; through the single-glazing Clara felt an icy breeze as she cut off shreds of her kipper to eat. She stole a rasher of bacon, too, much to the Doctor's annoyance.

"I cook for you every day, and you won't even let me enjoy the sanctity of my own meals?"

"I want some bacon," Clara pouted.

"Whatever. Nothing's sacred with you around. So you're her cousin now?"

"Apparently. I thought it's a good story."

"So long as nobody goes and tells her. She said Lily screamed at them when they questioned her about this guy."

"Yeah…"

"But he can't love her. So he must be manipulating her."

"I guess she's naïve. Thinks she's in love. Emma Grayling once suggested that my infatuation with _you_ was a bad thing, which I wasn't particularly happy about."

"But were you naïve?"

"Maybe. Handsome stranger whisks me away in a spaceship – how's anyone supposed to stop themselves falling in love with you?"

"Donna managed it. And Adam Mitchell, I don't think _he's_ in love with me."

"He might be. All this time, he's been using my sister just to get closer to you."

"You really _are_ naïve." She went about shoving an entire hash brown into her mouth, much to Clara's disdain. Couldn't she at _least_ cut it up first? Then again, Clara thought she had better count her blessings Thirteen hadn't drenched everything in hot sauce, which she tended to do. She'd once put hot sauce on a Caesar salad.

"Does this place still exist when we're from?"

"No. It's a Starbucks."

"Oh," Clara's mood fell slightly, "That's a shame. This is the best smoked kipper I've ever had. Second best, actually, after Jenny's – but she did run that seafood restaurant for years. I could _kill_ for one of Jenny's lobster rolls right about now, you know."

"Are we gonna get a new car?" Ever since the incident involving Adam Mitchell's borrowed Ferrari being destroyed after driving through a time-rift they'd been carpooling to work every day with Sarah Pickman. They hadn't generally talked with her much before – she was in the French department, after all – but she drove them as long as they helped pay for the petrol.

"We keep wrecking them."

"I know, but… I was just thinking we could get, like, a fixer upper."

"Oh?"

"Some old, busted ride. I could strip it out and revamp the whole thing. Y'know, over the summer. You said you wanna stay in Brighton for the whole summer instead of going back to the ship, and it'd give me something to do. Wouldn't cost much, if that's what you're worried about."

Clara didn't need to think about this long, "If you can find a write-off you fancy repairing, feel free. As long as it's not a Vespa."

"…I wasn't thinking about a Vespa," she said unconvincingly. "It's just this decade. Like we were saying, I lived here for a long time once. And I had a car, and people who actually let me drive it. A bright-yellow roadster."

"Who are you, Jay Gatsby?"

"Funny."

"Why not just grab a car from the TARDIS?"

" _Because_ I need a project. Something to do outside of lesson plans. Nick isn't even really changing up the syllabus at all, anyway, so I basically have nothing new to plan," she said.

"Just, I don't know, run it by me, yeah? Before you make any rash purchases."

"Sure thing. I can't wait. Gonna enter into street races."

"Have fun with that. But I'm serious, not a Vespa."

"I already have a Vespa on the ship _anyway_ … even though there's nothing more Brighton than a Vespa."

"Debatable, I think – oh, sh…" She stopped herself from saying 'shit' halfway through the word. Across the room was Tara talking to a short girl with skin so pale it was nearly translucent, mousy brown hair and a timid air about her. Tara was pointing out Clara to this girl, with big, round glasses with lenses so thick they were like miniature telescopes, and there wasn't a shred of recognition in her eyes.

"Dammit," said the Doctor, realising the same thing Clara had. But she didn't run like Clara had suspected she'd do. Instead, this girl who most certainly passed unnoticed by most everybody in all areas of life, marched right towards them and pulled up an empty chair to their table. They both froze.

"What do you want?" she hissed at them. Already she was drawing attention. "I haven't got any cousins from up north, and I definitely don't know any Americans. I've never even _met_ an American."

"I'm not really sure I count," said the Doctor, trying to finish her food _and_ pay attention to this most surprising turn of events. Lily stank of cigarette ash and Clara found this slightly intoxicating, and she struggled to stop her hand from shaking.

"We just wanted a word," said Clara.

"There've been a lot people wanting words with me lately."

"So we've heard. We're not the police." Clara had had a plan up to that point, a plan to tactfully get Lily to overhear a staged conversation about boy troubles – the usual, 'my boyfriend keeps killing people and wants me to help him cover it up' troubles – which would trick her into gossiping and opening up, like Tara. But she wasn't as timid or easily tricked as Clara had been counting on, apparently.

"I don't care if you're not the police. You could be anyone, showing up here asking after me. How do you know who I am? How do you know where I work?"

"We want to talk to Baby," said Clara seriously. If it were possible, the girl turned even paler.

"Anything you can say to Baby, you can say to me. We're getting married in the morning. At the registry office."

"Romantic," Clara said dryly.

"It _is_ romantic," she snapped, "He loves me."

"Does he?" Clara asked, "Because we heard that you're his alibi for a bank robbery."

"He was with me."

"You know the police can't make a wife testify against her husband in court, don't you?"

"So you _are_ with the police."

"Do we look like we support the totalitarian subjugation of the populace?" the Doctor questioned, "I'm not a class traitor. Damn pigs."

"Yeah, okay," Clara waved a hand at her to make her be quiet, "Nobody cares about anything you have to say."

"Gee, thanks. Look, we're not cops, kiddo. But the boy's bad news. He doesn't run with a good crowd, y'know? You gotta tell us where he is."

"We saw him try to kill somebody yesterday," Clara began to whisper, "A family man, two kids and a wife. Almost had his throat ripped out underneath Palace Pier. Can you imagine that? Dying out there with the seaweed and the rubbish? Washed away in the tide?"

"I know what kind of person he is," Lily said firmly. She was involved much deeper than they initially suspected.

"Is he your first boyfriend?" Clara asked, guessing. The girl didn't answer, she looked at the floor instead. Clara knew this meant 'yes.' "There'll be other boys. I've known lots of boys. And trust me, I know they all seem like they're the answer to some big question, but… they're not."

"You've known 'lots' of boys? You're the kind of girl my mum warned me about when I was young. The kind of girl she told me not to be."

"Oh, well, I mean – it's the 60s. You can get the pill now."

"I don't think this is the time to have an argument about abstinence and contraception," the Doctor told her.

"My point is that you _will_ meet another boy. A nice one, who won't do anything that you'll need to cover up to the police," Clara implored, "Surely you see that's not good? That he'd ask you to do that? Men shouldn't do that, don't you think? It puts you in danger. Someone who loves you wouldn't want you to be in danger."

"Things aren't as simple as all that," she said. It was true, of course – Clara had lied to the police on the Doctor's behalf more times than she could count, and vice versa, like the time Eleven had been arrested on suspicion of being the Black Dahlia killer. She'd also stolen a car that day. But she doubted Lily knew anything about Baby's ability to see through time and manipulate it to his will, or about his dreams of grandeur as Brighton's criminal overlord. "Why should I wanna meet another boy? I'm already sixteen and I ain't never had one before."

"Only sixteen? You've got loads of time," Clara told her. She scoffed.

"This is the age respectable girls get married at."

"No, it's – you… he's not good for you," Clara felt useless. And she taught sixteen-year-olds in school every day, was supposed to help them through life and stop them from making ridiculous mistakes like this – but now all of her time as a teacher had been for nothing. She couldn't convince one confused girl decide that marrying a psychopathic gangster was a bad idea. "You know he's in the mob?"

"That's just something people say. It's not as bad as the papers make out."

"He's only marrying you to keep you quiet, he doesn't-" Clara hissed. Then Lily let out a horrendous shriek, wordless sounds, and Clara jumped back in her chair and leant towards the window. The entire café went dead, everybody now turning to look at the incident in the corner. The girl, however, remained oblivious. Didn't care a jot for the scene she was making.

"You don't know anything. I don't even know who you are, never seen you before in my life," she continued.

"That doesn't mean we don't have your best interests at heart," said the Doctor, "We just want-"

"No. I'm not taking advice from a couple of perverts like you," she kicked out her chair onto the floor and stood up, "And I'm not taking orders from the people in here anymore, either." And with hardly any warning she was sweeping out of the room.

"Someone's more neurotic than she let on," Clara remarked.

"Go after her," Thirteen hissed, "I'll pay, you go. She might lead us to him or give us some kind of clue."

" _Me_ go after her?"

"You're the Phantom! _Go_ , I'll wait behind."

Clara, all alone, gave chase. She wended through the tables and picked a black, man's overcoat from the back of a chair as he himself had nipped off to the toilet. His companion, who was obviously his wife, objected to this loudly.

"I'll bring it back," Clara said, using her telekinesis to easily tug it out of the wife's hands and throw it around her shoulders as she followed Lily out into the midday storm. She wrapped the black coat tightly around her otherwise rather obvious red dress and tried to turn up the collar against the wind and rain, but it lashed against her face and soaked her hair anyway. Lily was already crossing the street, hardly looking at the cars and the trams going by, while Clara remained on the opposite side, shadowing her and wishing she'd brought the umbrella.

Clara had never been able to pinpoint the exact time in her life when her joking alias as 'the Phantom' had become a legitimate, Doctor-ish moniker. Some ridiculous identity she had grown to share with her vampiric counterpart – as well as their literary pseudonym (she wrote the poems, Ravenwood wrote the books) – thanks to their joint prowess when it came to sneaking around. Of course, she didn't have the liberty of not showing up on camera or passing utterly unnoticed if she just stood still; but Ravenwood couldn't walk through solid objects or teleport. And of course, the biggest benefit was that _she_ could still eat garlic bread.

Lily glanced over her shoulder to check she wasn't being followed; Clara paused and leant on the side of a parked car, watching Lily's blurry shape in the glass frontage of a shop opposite. With the black overcoat and staying across the street it was easy to remain unseen, and as Lily went on her way so did Clara. A black trilby flew towards her in the storm, presumably lost by someone who couldn't keep their hand on it in the wind. Clara snatched the damp thing out of the air and put it on her own head, taking advantage of a gap in the traffic to cross the road at the same time. With the upturned overcoat collar and the trilby, following a girl to her mobster boyfriend in the middle of the storm, she suddenly felt like a character in a noir detective story. Perhaps she had a revolver stashed somewhere on her person, Captain Jack style, ready to pull out at the last second if she got into a tough spot. Of course, it this _were_ a detective story, she would presumably have more than a purely financial interest in the girl. A will-they-won't-they inkling of intense romance rippling under the skin. That wasn't the case, though, obviously, and Clara – fighting against the bitter chill, almost out of character for the late spring of May – was getting carried away in idle fantasies.

Some rattling Ford she recognised as being a model from the late-Forties shot by, breaking the speed limit and careening into a muddy puddle pooling next to the pavement; dirty brown water splashed over Clara, soaking her legs which weren't quite protected by the coat. That snapped her out of her detective idealising, unless the detective she was pretending to be was Inspector Clouseau. Out in the stormy sea she saw the West Pier, which was enough to make her stop dead in her tracks. The West Pier, she knew from the Doctor's idle, hobbyist lectures, had stood derelict for decades when they came from. But in 1964 it was there as a rival to the Palace Pier, the only one to remain in the future. In the 21st Century, the West Pier was nothing more than a skeletal, blackened husk out on the ocean, destroyed by storms and various fires.

Clara's brief lapse of concentration meant that Lily, when she glanced over her shoulder again, still didn't spot her. She looked like a tourist trying to shield herself from the storm with a sensible coat, holding her hat to her head, gawking at the seafront. Lily had grown up in Brighton and was probably numb to the razzle dazzle tourist attractions – Clara, after all, hadn't given Blackpool Tower a second look for a _very_ long time; it was an eyesore on the horizon, just like some of the roller coasters (mainly because she had never much liked roller coasters.)

At that moment, Clara had a dawning realisation about something nasty, one which she hadn't put together until that second. She'd been too distracted by Archie Speyer earlier – who was undeniably _hot_ , or she thought at least – to take much note of two separate pieces of information she had learnt. But now she remembered. Finley Fletcher had been a suspect in the death of his wife in 1966, a death eventually ruled a suicide. His wife whose name had been Lily Watson before marriage. This girl Clara was tailing only had two years of life left in her, she'd die at the age of eighteen, all because of her juvenile infatuation with a manipulative murderer. She could not let that stand and continued her careful pursuit with all the more verve.

Lily Watson ducked into a red telephone box. Clara had only ever managed to teleport properly when she was panicking about something – like if she needed to quickly save the Doctor from being shot, or quickly save the Doctor from falling to her death, or quickly save the Doctor from being hit by a car, or save the Doctor from spilling hot coffee on their new living room rug – and obsessing over Lily's impending phoney suicide worked in her favour in this regard. She slipped into smoke in the rain, a pulsing headache in the background to this rare exhibition of her mutated 'superpower', and managed to appear outside the phone booth, by the side which was mostly blocked out with the large, vintage handset. Leaning against it she was shrouded from Lily within, too short to be seen over the top of the phone. Plus, the heavy rain worked in her favour, though it had ruined her hair; it made it very difficult to see through the glass.

She'd shown up too late to work out the number the girl dialled, but could just about hear muffled words when whoever was on the other end picked up.

"Baby? … Yeah, I know… I _know_ you said not to call, but… no, _listen_ … would… LISTEN!" she screamed at him, showing that dark streak that had briefly come out in the tea room. There was a pause. "There's these girls asking questions. …No, not coppers … course I haven't been followed!" She _had_ been followed, though; the girl wasn't proficient when it came to these criminal activities she was all of a sudden embroiled in. "Yeah, one was an American… northern, she said… they said they saw you-" The voice on the other end of the phone grew briefly loud enough for Clara to hear the buzz of it, even through the glass and over the rain. "I didn't tell them nothing, Baby. I'd do anything for you, you know that. Because you love me." Another soundless lapse while Lily listened to the instructions she was being given. It lasted for a while, so long that Clara wondered she hadn't hung up the phone. "Go home, lock the doors, don't answer to anybody," she said, clearly repeating the orders, "No, I won't call you again... In Cathy's… you'll stop them, won't you, Baby?" A pause. "Baby?" Still nothing. "I love you, too," she said emptily. He had already hung up the phone.

Anticipating that Lily was about to leave the booth and check, again, that she hadn't been followed, Clara hastily vaulted over the sea wall and down onto the rainy beach. It was a long fall, admittedly, almost ten feet, but telekinesis was helpful in situations like that where she needed to make herself scarce. Above she heard the door of the booth slam shut in the wind, pressing herself against the soaking concrete to avoid Lily. At least if she went home and away from Baby she'd be safe. For a while. Nobody had seen Clara jump the wall because nobody was out at the beach in that weather, and the visibility was so poor.

About a minute went by until Clara rushed over to the rickety, wooden stairs leading back up to the promenade, where she tried not to slide about in the mud-like sand too much (not helped by the fact she was wearing shoes with kitten heels that day). She got to the top and the phone booth as fast as she could, nearly knocking down a poor man who was also trying to get to it.

"Sorry," she apologised after barging right past him, "It's urgent business. I won't be long." She shut herself in the booth and picked up the handset of the phone, quickly dialling '100.'

" _Operator assistance, how may I help you?_ " asked a clean-sounding woman speaking with strong intonations of received pronunciation.

"Hi, could you please tell me the last number dialled from this phone?" Clara asked politely, but quickly. Lily had told Baby that she and the Doctor had been in Cathy's.

" _Of course, just a second_ ," said the operator. Clara waited, tapping her foot, looking apologetically at the man outside still waiting to use the booth. " _The number is Brighton, 33945_."

"Okay, uh…" she flipped through the wall-mounted telephone directory in front of her, searching for that specific number. "33945… 33945…" she found the page, but it had only the name 'V. Morgan' attached to it. "Do you have an address for this number, please?"

" _Yes, the address is 38C, St Mary's Place_ ," said the operator.

"38C, St Mary's Place?" Clara repeated, managing to dig out a pencil from inside the pocket of the borrowed, oversized overcoat.

" _That's correct._ "

"Great – thanks for your help," Clara said, scribbling the address onto the page in the directory with one hand. She hung up the phone and tore out the page, folding it and then balling up her fist around it as she left the booth, returning to the horrid rain.

Retracing her steps and hurrying now she wasn't having to hide, she made it back to Cathy's in under five minutes. Outside the door she let the borrowed trilby fly off into the wind again (knowing that if she didn't, her wife would steal it and wear it unironically and look like an idiot) and pushed open the door. The bell tinkled above and she hurriedly took off the overcoat and returned it to the man she'd taken it from.

"Thanks for that," she told him while his wife glared at her. The Doctor waited in her chair at the table, ready to go and finally done with her food.

"You look awful," she said, "Soaking wet."

"Thanks," said Clara, picking up the half-slice of cold toast she had left behind after leaving to follow Lily. She held out the piece of paper to the Doctor.

"What's this?"

"His address," Clara explained, "She walked to the nearest phone box and called him, so I called the operator and asked for the last number."

"Good initiative."

"You taught me everything I know."

"St Mary's Place – that's not so far, I know it," she said, "'C' is an underground apartment. Hard to get into."

"Uh-huh. We have to go. She told him on the phone where we are, no doubt he'll send somebody else out here after us, so we don't recognise them before it's too late."

"It's what I'd do," said the Doctor, dropping two of their shillings onto the table and standing up, "Come on, then. It's time for this Doctor to pay Baby-Faced Fletch home visit."


	6. Brighton Rock - Chapter 6

_Brighton Rock_

 _6_

He couldn't stand that stupid girl. He hated her more than he'd ever hated anyone, and he couldn't think of a great many people he _didn't_ hate. But there was something about her, how plain she was, useless, naïve, _insignificant_ – something about all that which made his skin crawl. She was a niggling annoyance he couldn't get rid of, a fly he couldn't swat; even the time he thought he had to himself she destroyed, calling up out of the blue with her concerns. Maybe it was useful of her to inform him of those women sticking their noses in his business, but he wasn't worried about them. They wouldn't be able to affect his plans, strange as they were. He was sure he knew much more than they did, he had the significant advantage. He only hoped Lily was right about not being followed. No doubt she wouldn't know she was being followed if someone stalked her right to her bed and strangled her. How he'd love to strangle her and stop her from ever saying another word…

He paced up and down the tiny, industrial bedroom of the underground squat he inhabited with his fellows. Three of them out at the pub, as usual, drinking themselves silly. It was why _he_ had all the big ideas, why _he_ was going to seize control of Brighton. Once he had Brighton he could move in northwards on London, and once he had London he had the whole country. Even he didn't know what kind of influence he'd be able to exert with the whole United Kingdom at his disposal. He could stop the obscene hippy fad, ban popular music, get rid of dancing, be the Oliver Cromwell of the modern age…

His attention was caught by a spider crawling along the wall, dipping briefly behind a yellowing shred of torn-away wallpaper. He hated that wallpaper. He slammed his hand on the wall and squashed the large spider dead, smirking to himself afterwards with icy mirth. Peeling back the paper he eyed the spider's corpse, a leg still twitching. Carefully, he reached up a thumb and forefinger and took the spindly leg between his digits, ripping it from the body and flicking it to the floor. He liked spiders, liked the way they made other people so uncomfortable, made them itch and tremble, liked the way Lily had shrieked when she thought she saw one on her dress and begged him to get rid of it. He had smacked her on the arm, claiming to have killed the bug which had never really been there. It had been the only thing which got him through the mundanity of their 'first date', 'first date' trying to establish exactly what she had witnessed outside of the bank that morning a few weeks ago…

He'd have the boys go pick up those girls shortly, after their barmy pub lunch was done. Pick them up, carve them a bit – though the boys often objected to any violence of that kind towards a female. Said they lived in a man's world and women oughtn't be brought into it, oughtn't suffer for the sins of their husbands or fathers. But if they were an inconvenience they were an inconvenience as far as he was concerned, and just like a bug they needed to be squashed.

Damp inched slowly across the ceiling from the corner with the leaky pipe. Morgan kept saying he'd fix it, but the lazy old sod had never gotten around to it. If there was one thing he hated, it was lazy people. The things that mob could have accomplished with somebody else at the helm, somebody other than Morgan, someone like _him_ … as soon as he got rid of Morgan, he couldn't wait to share his plans for Brighton with the rest of those dossers. Then they'd realise that he was the true visionary, the only one who wanted out of their small-time rackets, the only one who saw the potential.

Lucky he had his gift really, he thought, kicking over a chair in his frustration at Lily. Lucky he could see what was going to happen, what to change, how to do it. The consequences would come much later, a century down the line. He knew he'd be dead by then – unless he lived to be 118 – and didn't care about Brighton's destruction after he was gone. As long as he had the city in his grip while he was still around to see it, before he left that world to venture into the hellish afterlife he knew awaited him (an eternity of damnation at the hands of God, he was sure) – as long as he lived enough of the good life while he could still physically enjoy it, he should rather like that nobody else would get to reap what he had sewn. Not for long, at any rate. He knew how much he was going to destroy and loved the destruction almost as much as the raw thrill of the violence he enjoyed. There were few pleasures as simple and satisfying as giving some so-and-so a good carve. Slice right into their skin with his razor, just like his father had done to him when he was a boy. Before his father kicked the bucket, that was… the police never _could_ work out what, exactly, he had tripped on when he fell _all the way_ down the stairs that day…

Vinnie Morgan's days were done. Finley Fletcher's days were coming, and they were going to be a damn sight more fruitful, even if he did have that insufferable girl attached to his arm. She'd love it if they were joined at the hip, if she could handcuff him to her, make sure he could never get away. But maybe Lily would have an unfortunate accident and fall down the stairs, too. It brought him some relief to decide upon that course of action, already seeing it in his mind's eye, the secrets of time spilling out in front of him: there she was, he envisioned, sprawled out and broken, a messy, mousy heap at the bottom of the very same stairs leading down from the road into flat 38C. He looked at the floor in person right where he was standing and saw her ghostly corpse, an echo of their interwoven futures, there at his feet. Bruises on her neck, blood on her face making her nearly unrecognisable; it was the only time he had felt even a streak of pleasure from looking at her.

It really was a rotten pit in that cellar. He couldn't wait to escape from it and live in the kind of luxury that Speyer, the invert, was somehow afforded. Everybody knew his 'nature', his _perversion_ , it made Baby sick to his stomach to think about what Archie Speyer got up to with other men. His revulsion for fornication in general came to a vomit-inducing peak when faced with the backwards _breeding_ of those sinners. The nerve of them to try and gain a presence in Brighton, in _his_ city, filthy soldiers abandoning their wives and going to war to knock boots with any innocent lad who took their fancy. He couldn't stand the monstrosity. It was against everything he knew to be good and true, and he had every idea to quash this 'uprising' before it had a chance to take hold in his streets.

Again he kicked, smashing a hole in the wall and the plaster; no doubt Morgan wouldn't be happy about that, would try to make him fix it, but _he_ was the boss now. He'd get out his razor and cut Morgan a new one, chop him into pieces, let him bleed for _hours_. But when would those rotters be back from the pub? When would they be able to deal with these troublesome girls who knew too much about everything, the one his mind's eye was unable to anticipate? The ones who had hidden Bertie Fink from him?

The boy made up his mind at that moment. He would go gut them himself, stalk them through the streets. He could take them by surprise, slash them each across the neck, stab through the temple for good measure, like a butcher in the business of curing fine meats, or the Ripper returned. It was no different, really. He picked up his coat from the stand where it hung but was caught dead in his tracks.

It was an awful sensation he hadn't experienced for a great many years, since before his father's death. Frozen in place he was rendered, by some extranatural force, utterly unable to turn around. What felt like invisible hands closed themselves around his windpipe, like they were reaching through the skin, fat and muscle lining his throat and cut off his air supply directly, from within. _The girl_ , he realised, the one who had prevented him from slicing Bertie Fink's throat in half with nothing but her mind. But he couldn't turn to see any assailant, nor had he heard a single sound in his up-and-down, fervent pacing, planning his next move as well as musing upon how he was going to dispose of Lily Watson in the future.

His knees collapsed beneath him as his mouth rattled, spit forming at the corners of his lips as he was left unable to speak, swallow, cry out, or defend himself in any way. How was this fair? At least with a razor you knew where you stood. You saw the glint of it in the moon, heard the flick of the blade, felt its hot, sharp edge rip your flesh to pieces – of course he'd been carved before and knew exactly what it was like, the scar on his left cheek wasn't the only one inflicted upon him in his eighteen years. He fell to his knees and thought the blood vessels in his head may slowly be popping one by one, vivid colours and splotches filling what little his eyes could see as the air ceased to get to his lungs. Was he going to die? He buckled. His chest felt like it would collapse. It had gone quicker than he thought being choked would go, expecting it to last for what felt like silent decades of panic. But it was the opposite, Baby wasn't sure he had much time to think about it before he found himself capable of doing anything other than desperately trying to claw the non-existent hands from their tight position around his oesophagus. The last thing he felt was smashing his head against the wall as he toppled sideways and blacked out.

* * *

"I can't believe he'd kill her," said Clara with a hollow quality in her voice, sitting on the edge of Baby-Faced Fletch's worn out, sweat-stained cot bed. His bedroom was more like a prison cell, with only one thing attached to the wall: a black-and-white photograph of a young woman on her wedding day, the half of the picture with the groom torn away and leaving a craggy edge behind. She laughed and cut into her half of a modest wedding cake. It looked like it must be his mother with his father ripped away. "The poor girl…"

"Why does it get to you so much?" the Doctor inquired. She was leaning against the wall, watching Fletcher's unconscious form in the wooden chair Clara had seen him kick over as she had crept into the cellar apartment. She had floated telekinetically so as not to make a sound, witnessing him pacing up and down muttering things to himself about his grandiose plans for Brighton and the rest of the country. "I mean, we've met lots of murderers before. Why this one, potential murder?"

"It's just… I don't know. She's school-age. She'll be eighteen when he kills her. She could be a kid at school, and to get trapped in a runaway marriage like this? Killed just two years later by a man who doesn't care about her at all? It just… I want to help her. She's an innocent."

"Most murder victims are." Clara's eyes wandered to the gnarled, shiny skin on her left arm. The decades-old lightning wound from Esther's electrocution as she attempted to choke Liam Kent to death. Choking out Finley Fletcher brought back vivid memories of that attempt, but it wasn't as had to stop herself in this case. She wasn't a killer, after all, and Lily Watson wasn't dead yet. Far from it. She may have made a slew of bad decisions, but Clara knew there was still a chance. Looking at the scar she hardly noticed anymore, though, made her think about her vow to protect all of her Echoes. Protect them with her life if it came to it. It was the same inclination she felt for Lily.

"Do you know if we've changed anything yet?"

"Still fluctuating. It's bleak down here, huh? It's like a prison. And no pictures of naked girls on the walls? That's not what you come to expect from a teenage boy. I'm sure you had tons of pictures of naked girls on your walls when you were eighteen."

"You're wrong, actually," said Clara, "I have a very vivid imagination. And dad made me get rid of them all. Said they were 'objectification.'"

"Nice to see you're such a die-hard feminist." Clara shot her a glare, but the Doctor only smirked.

"Don't be homophobic."

"I'm Clara-phobic."

"Very funny. I guess you're right, though. There's not even a desk to write on in here." The only furniture aside from the bed was a very old wardrobe with one door broken off, a crucifix hanging from the one remaining doorknob. It contained what little clothes Finley Fletcher owned. "…What do you think it's like to be in love with someone who hates you?" The Doctor opened her mouth to reply but Clara interrupted again, "And don't make a joke this time."

"…I don't know. It's never happened to me. I don't fall in love easily enough for it to be non-reciprocal. I guess I've been on the receiving end of affections I'm not quite as passionate about before, but I've never _hated_ any of them."

"What makes people do stuff like this?"

"I don't know, Coo," the Doctor said sympathetically, "I don't necessarily understand the inner workings of your species enough to say with any kind of conviction why some people become evil and some people don't. We've been together for half a century and I still wouldn't hazard a guess at what you were thinking at a given moment."

"Really?"

"Well, yeah. Why? Are you saying you always know what _I'm_ thinking?"

"No, but you're some ancient alien genius. I'm not. I'm just a girl."

"Nobody's 'just' anything. I bet you Lily Watson thinks she's 'just a girl', too. That's what everybody thinks. I've always thought it's extraordinary how no one consciousness is identical to another, even, say, your Echoes. I've not yet met an Echo who I can say was _exactly_ like you. The minutiae of life even work to distinguish you and Ravenwood. But that's what I find so endearing about you – humans, I mean. The way most of you are so convinced of your own insignificance, when I don't believe there's anything insignificant about any of you. I love showing that to people. It's why you make the best companions, not too caught up in yourselves to enjoy the wonders of the universe, even a narcissist like you."

"You were doing so well at being charming, too."

"It's one of the things I like about being in a school. No wonder Old Twelvey used to lurk around when Ravenwood taught. Showing all those kids that they really _do_ matter, despite what society wants them to believe."

"I think he's waking up," said Clara. The Doctor uncrossed her arms and stepped forwards from where she was leaning on the wall. Fletcher stirred in the wooden chair, tied to it with a length of rope Clara had found underneath his bed; she dreaded to think what he had been planning on using _that_ for. She sort of wished they'd put a bag on his head, or something. Might've scared him into cooperating with them a bit more since they weren't exactly the most intimidating pair.

His icy blue eyes blinked open, casting an unfeeling gaze over them both. Bruises were already beginning to form around his throat from his telekinetic assault; she'd probably been too aggressive but didn't have an awful lot of practice suffocating people. In fact, she was sure she'd only done it less than half a dozen times, rendering her very unpractised. He glanced between them silently and then spat at the Doctor's feet.

"Eurgh!" she jumped away in horror.

"Didn't anybody ever teach you not to spit at people?" Clara snapped at him, doing her teacher-voice. She had had to tell many teenage boys off for spitting since for some reason they seemed unable to help themselves (personally, she had always found it quite repugnant.)

"Perverts like you don't count as people, I reckon," he said darkly. He was too cocky for his own good, still thought he had an advantage in lieu of having all the relevant information. So what if he knew her name? That was just basic telepathy. Wasn't nearly enough to scare her.

"And there's the famous Finley Fletcher homophobia."

"It's Baby," he said coldly.

"Maybe you should be less of a gobshite if you want people to call you by a stupid nickname," Clara persisted.

"Like what? Like 'the Phantom'?"

"Exactly," she said, "People call me that because I'm not a jumped-up little arsehole."

"You have no idea who you're talking to."

"I think I do. I think I'm talking to a pathetic little boy who's too big for his boots, who wants more than he's ever going to get," she said, "Someone who's already plotting how to murder a girl he hasn't even married yet."

"She's pathetic. She won't amount to anything, anyone can see that. Best she does is help me achieve my dreams. That's all a good wife should do, help out her husband," he said, "You inverts won't understand that, though."

"Uh-huh."

"So you know about her," the Doctor began to speak, nodding at Clara, "But what do you know about me? Y'know, in your 'mind's eye', or whatever?" Fletcher silenced, eyeing her up and down. She met his gaze and held it with a degree of authority Clara rarely saw in her, or any of the Doctors. It was only a glimmer of the part of the Doctor which made armies turn and run at the mention of her name. "Do you know my name? Aliases? Where I'm from? What I am?" Nothing. "Guess not. You see, you're a low-level telepath. You get inklings of the future, little kernels of information about people you've only just met, that kind of thing. You can make educated guesses about what might happen, who to manipulate and when to get what you want. But that's small fry compared to me.

"I'm not even from this planet. I'm from a world millions of lightyears away which died eons ago, and the reason you can't really see anything about me and my future is because I'm too big for a tiny brain like yours to understand. Clara's a human, see. An extraordinary human, obviously, but a human. I'm twelve-hundred years old and I've defeated armies, destroyed planets, saved galaxies. You're just some kid with a gift he's using for evil; you got a bit lucky, but you're tearing apart reality with your own malignant ambition."

"It's not possible to be from another planet. It's ridiculous."

"You see? Tiny brain versus incomprehensible, borderline-omniscient alien. If this is a battle of wits, you can't win. I can see time as well. I'm a Time Lord. I can see _everything_ , every point in the universe, and I know what can and can't be changed, too. But we're sworn not to interfere; you're too stupid to know better, taking advantage of things you don't understand. We were in the future just living our lives-"

"Your lives are abominations."

"Shh," the Doctor put a finger to her lips, "The grown-ups are talking now, Finley." He was not happy about being patronised. Clara watched him closely and noticed he was slowly trying to work his way free of the ropes around his hands – she'd keep him in the chair telekinetically if he did manage to get out, though. After all, they'd already searched him and taken his second straight razor. There was no way he could draw back a fist and punch out the Doctor before Clara could stop him. "As I was saying, we were living our nice, abominable lives in peace, in the year 2064. And then Brighton ends up destroyed, which I'm sure you know but don't care about."

"How did you get here if you were in the future?"

"Oh, y'know. You just ruptured space-time and caused enormous temporal shifts to spring up across the city, dragging things from the past to the future where they don't belong. Couple of old bikes, a rockin' pirate radio station – and all those extreme anti-women, anti-gay attitudes you've got tucked away in your nasty mind. Your old-fashioned family values don't have a place in the 2060s, and certainly not in Brighton. Not to mention your schemes to murder that poor girl, which we know about because you were suspected of foul-play and nearly arrested for it."

"I'll make doubly sure not to mess up then, now you've told me that."

"Baby, you're not going to be able to make sure of anything in a while. I just thought I'd give you the courtesy of explaining to you what you've done and why you're being punished."

"Punished? I'm just tied up. You ain't got no authority."

"On the contrary, I'm the only person with _any_ authority when it comes to people who decide they're gonna screw up history. There's temporal monsters, Reapers, circulating out there, waiting to crawl out of the woodwork and devour anything they see as a threat to the progression of time. That's the consequences of trying to break a fixed point in time, you destroy reality, existence itself, kill millions of people. And for what? For a get rich quick scheme? To buy parliament and push your agendas into law? Stopping women getting equal pay, stopping them from getting the right to an abortion? Stopping gay people from getting married? In _Brighton_?

"Brighton's actual destiny is to become the queer capital of the UK, you know. A nest of left-wing politics, protests, demonstrations-"

"Gay bars," Clara interjected for a moment.

"Exactly," Thirteen nodded, " _Gay bars_. I mean, we're married and they let us teach jointly in a school. I bet you hate the idea of that, us, educating people. Teaching them that it's okay to be gay."

"It's disgusting."

"Thanks, I'll take that into consideration the next time I go down on her," Clara muttered.

"I'm gonna be sick…" Fletcher complained. "This is my home, you know. You're trespassers, you've broken in. If I got the bobbies on the blower you'd be sent to prison for this, _and_ for what you are. _Marriage_ , for you folk – marriage is holy. In the eyes of God. God would be sick just like me if you ever tried that kind of union."

"Every time people say shit like that I really do wonder if they've ever read the Bible," Clara argued with him, "Because I've read it, and it doesn't actually have any of this hate-talk in it people like you like to cite. If you really cared about Christianity you'd know it teaches to love everyone regardless of your differences."

"I been to church on Sunday every day of my life."

"Then you obviously haven't listened to a word they've said."

"You oughta break out your Playboy collection so he can see all kinds of exciting 'abominations,'" the Doctor joked, "You have all those girl-on-girl editions."

"How would you know? Have you been looking at them?"

" _No_ ," she said defensively, "I just… I've seen them."

"Sure you have. You've just 'seen' them."

"You keep them under the bed! Sometimes I need to look for stuff that's under there!" she argued. Clara continued to pretend like she didn't believe her and the Doctor eventually just shook her head, annoyed. "Whatever, Clara. _Whatever_."

"You done with you little squabble?" Baby snapped at them.

"Shut up," Clara told him sharply.

"You can't stay here forever to stop me from doing what I like."

"We won't need to," the Doctor resumed her spiel, "You're too much of a risk to leave alone."

"Whatcha gonna do? Kill me? You don't have it in ya."

The Doctor stepped towards him and leant down, meeting his gaze directly.

"You're going to wish I'd killed you. I hate to make anybody suffer, but I've got a surprising knack for cruel and unusual punishments. And a fair few telepathic abilities of my own, ones which make yours look like a cheap carnival attraction. Baby, when we leave this awful cave _very_ soon, you won't know your nickname. You won't know your real name, you won't know Lily Watson's name, you won't know where you are, who you are, you won't have your perverse views of religion, you won't be scheming to get rid of Archie Speyer, and you won't be a threat to Bertie Fink. In fact, the way with these delicate operations is that you might not even remember how to feed yourself or go to the toilet alone. You'll be empty. _You'll_ be empty, but everybody else? Alive. Safe. I don't like to do it," she reached up her hands and pressed her fingers to his temples, "I don't like to do it at all. I'm not going to be able to look at myself in the mirror for weeks or look Clara in the eye, but sometimes things just have to be this way. And you've had your eighteen years; if you got it your way, Lily would only have eighteen years as well. It's kind of a trade-off. Besides, Lily's devoted to you. Chances are she finds you here, a bona fide vegetable, and she'll want to take care of you. She'll be by your side every second of every day making sure that you, her precious Baby, stays alive and well." Finally, Finley Fletcher was getting scared, tried to pull away from the Doctor, frantically craved an escape now that he finally believed that she outmatched him a billion times over. "But y'know. Maybe Lily will help you to learn who you are all over again, maybe that sweet girl will rub off on you and you might become the perfect gentleman. Everyone deserves a girl like that, don't you think? Although, even if she does help you through all that, even if you do remember your personality, the telepathic capabilities of your mind will be locked off forever. You'll _never_ regain them. If you do remember, you shouldn't squander that gift like you squandered this one, and know that I'll be keeping an eye on you from now until you're stuck in a coffin in the ground."

He began whispering something very fervently then, a low prayer of some kind, but then the Doctor closed her eyes and Clara witnessed Fletcher's roll back inside his head. They turned white and his leg twitched, mouth still moving with the hushed ghost of the prayer he had been struggling to recite. If there was a god up there, Clara doubted that Finley Fletcher was getting much of a look-in.

It didn't take long for him to go limp in his chair, at which point the Doctor dropped her hands and straightened up again, looking into space. Neither she nor Clara spoke for a while.

"…You had to do it, sweetheart," said Clara, who had purposely not asked the Doctor what her plan was in the fear that it would be something she couldn't stomach. As it was, she didn't like what had happened to Finley Fletcher, but failed to see an alternative aside from actually killing him or locking him on the TARDIS forever. Preventing his telepathy was the best course of action.

"I bet you can't stand me right now."

"I knew who you were when I married you," Clara said, getting up from the bed she had been perched on all this time, "I've never thought that you'll have to stop making difficult decisions just because you have me in tow. It was what needed to be done, okay? Did it work? Is time repaired?"

"It's… repairing. A work in progress. But yeah. The ripples have stopped." Clara touched Thirteen's arm lightly. "Doing that really knocked me for six."

"Let's go. Before his cronies get back, whoever they are. There's more than one bedroom down here and it isn't his name in the phone book, so…" She paused and waited for the Doctor to move, which took longer than anticipated. Clara took her hand and tried not to look at the vegetative body of Baby-Faced Fletch, who had for a time been Great Britain's most notorious gangster. "What is this place, anyway? It's weird having an underground flat here."

"It's, uh, an air raid shelter," the Doctor said, straining to think straight as Clara pulled her gently towards the stairs and the exit, "Reinforced. Probably against nukes. Wouldn't work, obviously, I can't smell any lead in the walls. Cold War hysteria, though…" She didn't go off on her usual mini-lecture about what the Cold War was like in that specific year, disorientated and feeling the resentment she had told Fletcher she would feel immediately after destroying his mind. Clara wasn't angry at her, though; the Doctor didn't need her wife to act like she hated her when she was already full of enough hate towards herself sometimes. All the Doctors were like that, though.

* * *

Clara picked a few soggy chips out of her newspaper-wrapped portion, stinking of salt and vinegar. The Doctor had lost her usually enormous appetite and was sitting on the floor, zoned out and melancholy. They were inside a police box, sheltered from the rainstorm but away from people, both against the wall and opposite each other with their feet out. Clara wasn't really feeling her chips anymore, and the hunger left from her unfinished kipper had subsided after just a few bites. She left the damp paper in her lap and looked at the Doctor.

"Weird place for a date, eh?" she said, trying to lighten the mood. The Doctor said nothing. "…I thought there's supposed to be police officers in these things?"

"No, the police put criminals in them when they're waiting to take them to the station. They don't have constables sitting in them twenty-four-seven 'just in case.'"

"Oh. You know… I kind of expected it to be bigger on the inside. I suppose after so many years of going in and out of the TARDIS, you just expect it to happen."

"When Reapers showed up after Rose saved her father's life, this is what the TARDIS was like. Hollow and empty, like a movie prop. Damn phone didn't even work."

"…Do you still want to stay in the 60s for a while?"

"Not really." Clara paused to watch her for a few seconds, but the Doctor wasn't giving much attention to anything happening outside of her own mind. So, Clara picked up the portion of chips and moved so that she was sitting next to the Doctor rather than opposite her. "You're sitting in the puddle coming in from under the door.

"I don't care," said Clara, though she did care a bit because muddy rainwater seeping through the fabric of her dress wasn't a nice feeling. "I don't really know what to say to make you feel better this time." And she usually had such a good track record of figuring out the right thing to say to the Doctor. "Sometimes we have to choose the lesser of a few evils and just… try to accept that it was the best thing to do. Have a chip." The Doctor took one but made a face after biting into it.

"Tastes like cold vinegar. They're drowning. The newspaper will tear at the bottom."

Clara shrugged, "Oh well." The Doctor finished the chip regardless. "At least Lily will be okay."

"What was it about her that got to you?"

"I don't know, I just… feel a responsibility."

"This is your GCSE exam anxiety coming out sideways. That's my favourite thing about you; you care so much about people. Even people you barely know, and those kids at school. If you think that wiping his mind was the only option, then… urgh. I should've talked to you about it first…"

"No need. I trust you. We would have just debated it for a while and drawn the same conclusion. You know what they say; it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission."

"Y'know," the Doctor leant back against the wooden wall of the box, the rain and wind from the storm making it shake, "It is kinda sad we can't have kids of our own." Clara was startled. They had not talked about children, not like _that_ , for a very, _very_ long time. "Don't give me that face, I just mean you'd be a good parent, that's all. I've still got Jenny as my number one parental priority; I still consider her a bit of a tearaway."

"A chip off the old block," Clara composed herself slightly.

"Nice idea, though? Like, raising somebody. Getting them when they're fresh, new. Haven't done that for a thousand years. And even then, Time Lords don't really do the whole childhood-thing. Not in the same way humans do."

"I dunno. Mickey and Martha have always made it look like a _lot_ of work. And so do you, since Jenny never listens to anything you say." The Doctor laughed.

"Worthwhile work. Don't you think the same about Oswin?"

"Oswin's not growing up or progressing. It's a battle just making sure she's okay, Adam and I both know that too well. Maybe it's for the best. What if we had a kid that turned out like Finley Fletcher? Some psycho? How much of that is to do with his upbringing and how much is just… him?"

"Not the nature versus nurture debate," the Doctor smiled, "Next you'll be wondering why you turned out bi."

"I know why I turned out bi."

"Why's that?"

"Because everybody is hot."

"Wow. You've cracked it."

"Thank you. I have a vested interest in sexuality. You know, professionally."

"'Professionally'?"

"You know what I mean."

"Not really."

"What is the solution to the nature versus nurture debate, then? If you know so much?"

"Oh, jeez," she leant back in thought, "You're testing me, wifey. I'm not exactly an authority when it comes to psychological concepts. I'm just not super interested in brains. Like, they're grey and slimy – what's the fuss? I don't know what made Finley Fletcher the way it is. Maybe it's to do with the way we categorise behaviour and create our own moral taboos. Who says murder is wrong, after all? People do. That's why we think it's wrong." She paused and Clara didn't speak. "Not that I'm saying murder is _right_ , obviously… let me sleep on it. Do some reading. Then I'll get back to you with the answers to all your psychology questions."

"Sure."

"…How are you feeling?"

"Exhausted."

"Do you know how we're going to get home?"

"We don't belong here. We should be returned via a temporal shift at some point soon. Failing that, I guess wait a few hours and call the TARDIS. Sooner the better, though…"

Sooner the better was right. No sooner had she said that than the rainfall instantly stopped outside. Clara had never heard rain end _that_ abruptly, it normally petered away – if only for a few seconds. But the storm seemed to completely disappear, sunlight came flooding through the rectangular windows of the police box, and then the very walls began to fade around them. It was like being in the TARDIS as it disappeared, only if the TARDIS left her behind and didn't make its characteristic thrumming sound. Like when the Vespas had come out of nowhere and the Doctor had almost been hit by a vintage care, the police box vanished, and they were drenched in the sunlight of a bright, summer's day, sitting right on the pavement with the Palace Pier in view nearby.

Tourists flocking the area gave them a strange look and nearly tripped over Clara's legs as she hastened to get back to her feet, holding out a hand to help the Doctor up, too. It was strange how those shifts never felt like anything.

"Oh, wow," said the Doctor, "Can you believe that? Like I made a wish, or something."

"Uh-huh. Would you just-" Clara grabbed her elbow and _again_ had to rescue her distractible wife from being crashed into. This time it wasn't by anything so deadly as a car, however, but instead by a young boy on a skateboard. The Doctor was nearly knocked over but proceeded to spin around to get a better look at this boy, who didn't even apologise for nearly running them down.

"Hey – did you-!? Did you see that, Coo!?" she exclaimed.

"The kid? Yeah, _you_ didn't, that's why-"

" _No_ , he's on a hoverboard! Hoverboards aren't – they-" She just spluttered while Clara dropped her cold, rain-spattered chips into the nearest bin. What was the date? Was it really 2064? Were they back where they belonged? There was nothing different about that stretch of promenade from when they had walked along it yesterday, even the exact same ice cream vendor could be seen nearby, the same rainbow bunting and banners getting ready for Pride Month (and Clara could cry tears of joy seeing Brighton return to the gay utopia it was supposed to be.) The only error was a kid on a hoverboard. She took the emergency backpack from the Doctor and drew her foldable tablet out of it, which immediately re-established its connection to the internet.

And there it was on her news app, the date: May 31st, 2064. A Saturday.

"It's the right date," said Clara, already googling 'hoverboards.' And what a marvellous thing she did find, on a Wikipedia page no less. She nudged the Doctor in the back to get her attention and began to summarise: "It says here that hoverboards were first put into commercial use, after a _lot_ of argument about how safe they were, in 2058. Six years ago. Invented by… jesus."

"They were invented by Jesus?"

"They were invented by Brighton-born inventor Charlie Watson. _Watson_. That means that by stopping Lily from marrying Fletcher-"

"…We've invented hoverboards a few decades too early?" the Doctor finished her sentence.

"It, erm… seems that way. Is that bad? Do we have to go back in time again?"

"No, it's… it's okay. Some things are always bound to change; you can't iron out _all_ the creases. It's like in _Flashpoint_."

"Or, you know. _Back to the Future_."

"Yeah," she laughed, "This time we really _have_ gone back to the future..."

"Mmm… and do you know where I want to go? _Home_. We could even finish what we started yesterday afternoon," Clara said wryly, taking her hand after putting her tablet away. The Doctor liked this idea a lot, and thought it was just the thing to lighten the mood after a bleak few hours; together they walked along the sun-bleached promenade, Palace Pier shimmering in the sea behind them, finally able to enjoy Brighton for what it was always meant to be.


	7. Nowhere Girl - Chapter 1

**AN: Trigger-warning: major character deaths literally immediately. It took me a long time and a lot of drafts for me to get this storyline right and not shy away from the most heart-breaking parts, but it wouldn't be doing them justice to cut it out.**

 _Nowhere Girl_

 _1_

Empty hospital beds waned in and out of focus in front of Matilda Smith-Jones, who was dumbly aware of what their emptiness signified. There was a droning noise incessantly ringing next to her as she slumped against the wall and stared into space. She only cared about what she couldn't hear: she couldn't hear breathing, she couldn't hear the heart-rate monitor, the respiratory machines, just the gut-wrenching silence of death.

"…you can call? …Miss? … _Miss_." The nurse touched her shoulder and she jerked, startled, like she had only just seen the woman for the first time. She smiled at Matilda with tired and semi-vacant eyes, distracted and thinking about something else, clearly. Like how tired she was, how what she had in the break room for her 3am lunch on the nightshift, counting down the hours until she could go home. Matilda's world may have imploded in that clinical, white room, but nothing had changed for the nurse attempting to talk to her. "I said, is there somebody you can call?" She said nothing. "I'm sorry about your parents. I can't imagine how it must feel to…" Mattie looked at her silently. "Do you want a leaflet? We have a very efficient grief counselling program for under eighteens on the NHS."

"Efficient?"

"Pardon?"

"'Efficient' grief counselling? What makes a counselling service 'efficient'?"

"Patients move through it very quickly."

"Fast-tracked grieving process? Is that healthy?" Now the nurse went quiet. Matilda felt guilty, the nurse was only trying to help her, after all, and was very young and therefore new. Not one of the middle-aged grandmotherly ones who smiled warmly and had a wealth of experience to fall back on… though, she assumed they did teach medical staff about how to talk to recently bereaved youths. Maybe she wasn't particularly empathetic. Mattie didn't apologise. "I'm not interested in any leaflets. Thanks." She didn't mean the 'thanks.'

"…I don't like to tell you this because I understand you're going through a difficult time-" An understatement. "-but there are people who need these beds in the ICU. Are there no grandparents? Aunts? We have leaflets for shelters and can put you in touch with officers from Child Protective Services?"

"She doesn't need Child Protective Services or any shelter." Rose Tyler swept into the room with a sense of purpose and eyes red-raw from crying. Mattie hadn't bothered to wipe her own tears and so they had just left streaks across her face. Rose hugged her tightly; Matilda didn't want her to let go. "I'm so sorry."

"Who are you?" the nurse asked Rose.

"I'm her godmother. Could you give us a minute?"

"The room needs-"

"I know," said Rose. The nurse took her leave, standing up and exiting the room, glancing over her shoulder and closing the door. "Haven't seen her around before," Rose released her hold on Mattie and took the newly-vacated seat by her side.

"I think she's new." Mattie then leant back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling.

"I'm so sorry I wasn't here," Rose said softly, taking her hand as she avoided looking at anybody or anything in particular. The private room was soundproofed and the silence hanging in the air was sickly. "How long's it been?"

"Not even half an hour."

"Half an hour… god, Matts, I…" Emotions welled up and Rose cleared her throat, continuing to talk very quietly, "Jack's sorting everything out." She didn't want to know precisely what 'everything' was, and Rose didn't tell her. "We've got to leave. I'm sorry. There was a car accident, and with the storm outside they're running low on space here." Rose echoed what the nurse had tried to tell her. But what could she say? She couldn't argue. They didn't need the beds in the ICU anymore. "I wish I was here with you when they…" Rose became overwhelmed again and wiped her eyes with a tissue she'd been keeping balled up in a clenched fist. "I didn't get to say goodbye…" Rose looked at the beds like they weren't empty. "We only went to get a coffee…" That had been nearly an hour ago, which was the longer than the usual amount of time Rose and Jack vanished for whenever they'd gone to get something to eat or drink. Then they always brought something back up with them for Matilda, who refused to leave the room. She had practically lived in that hospital room for the last two weeks, going home to poor sleep and constant babysitting from an assortment of people who all assured her that medicine was very good in the 2060s, excellent, and if anything happened…

But in the end, they'd refused anything offered by Mattie's wide, extended family. Any magic medicine, immortality-in-a-bottle, they didn't want it. And now she was alone, and she hated herself for feeling angry about that.

"We need to get you home," Rose said, seeing the figure of the nurse looming on the other side of the door. It was at this point that Mattie relented. Rose helped her to her feet like she couldn't walk, but she didn't try to stop her. Besides, she'd been sitting down for so many hours her legs did feel strangely numb, just like the rest of her. The nurse smiled coolly at them as they left, wending through the corridors full of sick people. Rose had to drag her aside to stay out of the way of a trio of porters rushing a blood-drenched car crash victim with his neck in a brace down and right into the room they had just left. "Do you want anything? A drink? Hot chocolate?" Rose tried to distract her. She meekly shook her head. "Are you sure?"

"It's not going to make them come back if I have a hot chocolate."

"You haven't really eaten all day."

"I'm not hungry."

Rose sighed and gave up for the time being. Mattie felt like if she even _thought_ for too long about eating something she might be sick, like it would occupy the empty space inside her, curdle, and be rejected by her grief.

Captain Jack Harkness, whom she generally thought of as an uncle despite him being her godfather, stood sombrely in at the revolving doors out of the building with a folder of documents. Death certificates? Recommended funeral homes? 'Efficient' grief counselling leaflets? She didn't want to know. He met her eyes with a knowing look, not trying to smile but not crying, either. He reminded her of a soldier, bravely continuing on in lieu of tremendous personal loss.

"Accident's bad," Jack told Rose when they approached, "Nobody dead yet, though."

"Would've been a lot worse if nobody stopped the lorry," Rose told him. Mattie felt like they knew more than they were letting on about this accident, especially through the looks they were giving each other.

"I'm just saying-"

"He was drunk and driving on the wrong side of the road, what was I supposed to do?" Rose whispered.

"What did you do?" Matilda interrupted.

"Nothing," both Jack and Rose told her.

"Is that where you went? Is that why you were gone for so long?"

"He was a very reckless driver, I just slowed him down," Rose said cryptically.

"Why will you never tell me the full stories?"

"Because, your-" Rose stopped dead in the middle of the sentence, paused and rephrased what she was going to say, " _Because_ we don't want to influence you to get into trouble. If we tell you, it'll be like we're encouraging you, and I can't think of anything worse than you trying to stop a drunk lorry driver on a motorway in a midnight rainstorm."

"I wouldn't do that. I'm not _you_."

"And you don't want to be," Rose said. Mattie wasn't sure she knew what that meant. Jack didn't share the contents of his documents as he led them out into the rain. Every night for weeks it had been this way, leaving the hospital for only a handful of hours at a time with Jack and Rose for company. Only this time she wouldn't be coming back, she didn't have the shred of hope that her parents would… that they might…

Tears formed in her eyes as the rain spat down on them.

The car was parked close by and Jack got in the driver's seat. Rose let Mattie sit in the passenger seat and she curled up against the door, straining the seatbelt, looking out of the window into the dark night sky. She didn't know how she was supposed to feel, if what she felt was wrong, if she should be bursting into uncontrollable tears, crying for weeks and months non-stop until magically one day she just… wouldn't. Rose looked more upset than her while Jack kept everything deep inside. Where was she? Somewhere between them?

In the wing mirror she watched the bright lights of St Mary's Hospital glide away into the rainy fog.

"They're still there," she said blankly.

"Yeah," said Jack, "They… made the arrangements. A while ago."

"The 'arrangements,'" she repeated, eyes wide open and glued to the vanishing building.

"You don't have to think about all that."

"What if I want to think about it?"

"Do you?" he asked her. She didn't know the answer, and so said nothing, looking at the envelope of papers Jack had placed on the dashboard in front of him. It wasn't his car, it was her parents' car, but he drove it like he had a claim on it. Or maybe he didn't do that at all and she was just feeling especially sensitive to everything they had ever owned, touched, looked at, _thought about_.

"Do you want a tissue, Matts?" Rose asked quietly from the seat behind her. Matilda just about managed to nod and took a fresh one from Rose's hand, using it to wipe some snot away from her nose. Her glasses were spattered with rainwater and muck, but she couldn't be bothered to clean them.

"Gonna take us a bit longer to get back with the road closed," Jack said. Without the main road it was only a snaking maze of country lanes to get back to her isolated house way out of the way of Newport's suburbia. The Isle of Wight was one of her least favourite places she had lived, and they had always moved around very frequently after the incident twenty-ish years ago when she was only eighteen. Fifty years old and she had still never been to school and was stuck a recluse in the middle of nowhere, questioning her parents who had both grown up in the heart of London – as had Rose – about why she couldn't live in a big city, too. Where there were actually things to do.

"Dad said he'd teach me how to drive when I was old enough to not get pulled over."

"He said that to me, too," said Rose, "And I still don't have a real license. That's your dad for you."

"Yeah…" she said meekly. If only he could have delayed dying like he was so good at delaying everything else. Why did they both have to go at the same time? The same day? If there was a god or cosmic force somewhere in the universe, she wanted to ask it why it would be so cruel. Although… neither of them had ever seen a second without the other there, too. Maybe that counted for something. Did she want to see her mother grieve her father, or the other way around?

Selfishly, she thought, she would choose that over this. Though she would never be able to pick one of them, if she had to… It was a train of thought she didn't like, she realised when a tree branch knocked against the window of the car and startled her. Nobody was out there trying to make her choose between her parents, so why would she force herself to do it? What would that prove? It wouldn't prove anything. Could she be angry at them for not wanting to live without each other? (And yet, she was. Because there she still was, alone.)

"What happens when you die?" she asked Jack. She had asked him that before, and he had always evaded the question. Would he break the habit?

"It's better than being in pain," he said, "Being dragged back into life? That's the rough part."

"Why didn't they want any medicine?"

"They had lots of medicine, Mattie," Rose said.

"You know what I mean." She had asked them this herself when various people had come offering; the various Doctors with their regeneration energy, Rose with her god-like abilities, Oswin and her nanogene gadgets and miracle cure. They accepted the of-the-time medicines CyTech had developed, but nothing from the future and nothing alien.

"Some people don't want to live forever," Jack said, "I never chose to live forever. Rose never chose it. Time Lords are just… like that by nature."

"But you've never tried to go back."

"I go back and forth," Jack began candidly, keeping his eyes on the road, "Sometimes I hate it with every fibre of my being. Sometimes I'm terrified of what would happen if… well, don't think about that."

"What about Sally Sparrow?"

"That's complicated," said Jack coolly, "It's not like anybody else was consulted on that one."

"Had to be that way," said Rose, "She's got a role to play somewhere. And you can't blame her for begging for her life."

"Since when were you so keen on her?"

"I brought you back to life and she hasn't caused anywhere near as much damage. I can't blame Ravenwood for not wanting to put Esther through it, after Sarah, and her mum," Rose said. Matilda knew that Sarah was Esther Drummond's sister, and Esther had always been one of her more regular babysitters, but she didn't know more than that. "She was dying of cancer and she begged for her life for _months_."

"I know, I saw," Jack muttered, "I just don't trust vampires, especially not when they make more vampires."

"You're being dramatic, there's only two of them."

"Yeah, and you know whose blood they drink?"

"They drink a synthesised compound Oswin makes," Mattie said, something she _did_ know about despite all their attempts to stop her finding out basically anything about who they actually were. Not that she was entirely in the dark, she was very good at eavesdropping, when Rose wasn't getting magic hints that she was listening in. But she found the synthetic, cloned blood Oswin made, full of all the nutrients a hardy vampire would need, particularly interesting. She even had the formula to make it, though most of the compounds were impossible to come by.

"Yeah, but they used to drink mine," Jack said, "Mine and Clara's. We'd spent whole days together every couple of weeks just bloodletting, and I hate people taking my blood. Anyway, Mattie, the point is that your parents don't want to be vampires." She almost corrected his tense but left it. Why was she so keen to remind him that they were past tense now? It wasn't like he didn't know.

"Immortality is about as scary as dying," Rose said.

"Sorry," Mattie muttered somewhat sourly, "But I don't get it. I've never had a choice to wrestle with. I've just had to get used to it." She knew she was going to live for a _very_ long time. She had also known she was going to outlive her parents, in fact that almost everybody outlived their parents, but that didn't lessen the pain any.

"You're different."

"I'm 'different'," she copied. Rose stopped speaking. "Could've been the three of us forever…"

"Nothing's forever," said Jack.

"Like that helps. _Nothing's forever_."

The rest of the journey home, another twenty minutes, was in silence. She didn't like them talking but she didn't like the quiet. Maybe she would like them more if they said anything helpful, but they were – quite frankly – being useless. Didn't they know some solution? Something to make her feel better, apart from trying to make her drink hot chocolate? What good was so many years doing whatever-it-was they did if they didn't…

She didn't know where she was going with that train of thought. Didn't necessarily know where she was going with anything. Jack pulled the car into the dark road and drove them towards the old groundskeeper house that was theirs, bought after the private estate had been sold off. The house was pitch black, not a light on inside, full of things nobody had any use for any more. Her parents' things.

Crossing the threshold into that house was unimaginably difficult. Her mum and dad may not have set foot in there for nigh on two weeks, ever since her mother's cough had gotten so bad she could hardly breathe, and her father had had a bad fall while hurrying to help her, but now it felt emptier. There was no promise of return now, no 'maybe they'll be okay', because they weren't okay. And they were never going to see their home again. Every time had been a last time for them and they hadn't even known it…

Mattie froze by the door into the living room and looked at Mickey's favourite arm chair in the living room.

"Hey," Rose came up behind her, "You should try and sleep. You've barely slept the last few weeks."

"I'm not tired. Are _you_ going to sleep?" Rose had made up the spare room to stay in a while ago, while Jack always seemed to lurk. Mattie wasn't sure he ever slept.

"I… don't know yet."

"Then why do I have to go to bed? I'm not a kid." Rose didn't appear convinced by this statement. "I'm fifty."

"Not in maturity levels."

"So now I'm immature?"

"Matilda…" Rose said, "You need to try and sleep. You'll feel better."

"I won't," she said defiantly. Why was she trying to defy Rose's suggestion to help her, though? Now she felt guilty. She didn't even know if she wanted to stay awake, or what that would gain. But it would add more and more hours between the last time she had ever seen or talked to her parents, and she didn't want that. She didn't want the gap to grow wider. She didn't care about the people who said it would get better eventually, because she didn't want that vast expanse of hollowness inside her to grow.

"Mattie," Jack put his hands on her shoulders and spoke firmly, "They'd want you to look after yourself." And she knew he was right. So she gave up.

"…I'll just get a glass of water," she mumbled. They let her do this, at least, putting some time at least before she would have go up those dark steps into the crushing loneliness of her bedroom. Jack and Rose watched her do this, clearly waiting to have a private conversation among themselves which would undoubtedly concern her. Why couldn't she be involved in their talks about her?

"Let us know if you need anything," Rose called after her as she set foot on the first step, "Anything, no matter how small."

"…Okay. Thanks…"

Rose managed to smile, "You know we love you." She could only nod once and disappear upstairs.

It was a hard journey. Watching the nurses wheel them away had been hard; leaving the hospital had been hard; entering the house had been hard. Just breathing and keeping composure seemed hard, and she couldn't even work out why she _cared_ about her composure at all. But the hardest thing yet was walking past their bedroom. True, this house didn't have any special meaning to her, they hadn't lived there for long and she was good at not getting attached to places, but that was _their room_. Their room that was something else they'd never see again.

Tentatively she touched the door handle. Usually when it was quiet in there it was because they were sleeping, and she wouldn't want to wake them. For some reason it was the same behaviour she employed down, turning the handle as quietly as possible and then seeing the messy bed. Nobody had been around to make it after taking them to the hospital, it was just like they had left it, Jack and Rose and she herself leaving it utterly undisturbed. In that moment, the only thing that seemed logical to Matilda, the only thing that she thought might make her feel better, was kicking off her shoes and crawling into the sheets that still smelled of Mickey Smith and Martha Jones. They were ice cold but she imagined vividly that they were warm, still remembering when she was much, much younger and would sleep in with them if she had a bad dream or was homesick for the last place they had moved from. Or the night many years ago when her grandma Francine had died, which had struck her and her mum very hard indeed.

But the bed was still empty no matter how fond the memories were. She didn't care about her glass of water and clutched the tissue Rose had given her tightly in her hand, curling into a ball and finally feeling overcome with emotion. If she had thought she had felt nothing before, now she felt the crushing weight of _everything_ , and the fact that they were gone, and she would never see either of them again. It was the thoughts of her parents that made her shake as she sobbed, burying her face in her mother's pillow without even remembering to take her glasses off first. The world had come to an end, and Matilda cried herself into a dark, dreamless sleep.

She didn't know how long it was from the point when she had crashed to when she later awoke and did not initially realise that she had even managed to fall asleep. The two moments blurred together in a haze of tears, but the tissue she had been given by Rose had dried again in her hand, as had the pillowcase. She still felt her eyes burning though, but possibly from tiredness more than anything else. When she opened her eyes she saw her dad's old watch that hadn't found its way to the hospital with him. The watch said it was seven in the morning and she'd barely been asleep for four hours, but she could hear voices downstairs. For half a second of madness induced by her still being half-asleep, she had the fleeting thought it was her parents. She may as well have been punched in the gut when full awareness returned to her.

With half a mind to tell them to be quiet, she eventually pulled herself out of the bed and crept back out onto the landing, at which point the voices became crisp and clear. Bizarrely, she could swear it was Clara Oswald down there with Rose and Jack, who was now warning them to be quiet or else they would wake Matilda. It was almost entirely Rose who was being loud, though.

"Rose, calm down," another interloper advised. The Tenth Doctor. Mattie began to sneak down the stairs and listen.

"I'm calm," Rose argued, "I'm just confused." She didn't sound calm at all. "I don't understand why it's _her_."

"We haven't been _colluding_ ," an American accent not belonging to Jack hissed. Thirteen. What kind of meeting were they having? Aside from a very loud one.

"It doesn't make sense. You never see her. Something's clearly going on, I don't know. Maybe they didn't think it through, maybe – maybe they weren't in their right-"

"Now," Jack cut across her sharply, anger in his voice, "That's not something you should be suggesting, Rose. It was revised last week, with doctors for witnesses. Don't start accusing them of-"

"I'm _not_. It's just ridiculous! They're not even family!"

"Neither are you, technically," said Ten.

"How can you say that!? She's my _goddaughter_. And I care about her as if she was my own daughter. And I thought – and I talked to them, and – they never said-" Mattie snuck down the stairs and listened to Rose burst into tears. "Am I in there at all?"

"Yes," said Jack coolly, "Mickey left you his mug with a space invader on it."

There was a long pause, until Rose meekly said, "I bought him that for his birthday the first year we were going out…" And then her tears increased. Matilda had never known her dad's old space invader mug was so significant and capable of sparking such a poignant response from Rose.

"…What about Tish?" Thirteen asked after a few moments. Mattie continued to creep until she was balanced right on the bottom step and just out of sight from the living room. A shadow paced back and forth in front of the doorway, but she couldn't tell who it was.

"So, what? You don't even want the responsibility?"

"Nobody's saying that, Rose," Clara said quietly. She was the only one who sounded genuinely calm. Rose didn't argue.

"She has cousins," Thirteen continued.

"Martha left them a photo album. Mattie never sees her cousins, anyway. They don't really know about her," Jack explained, "Sending her to Tish would be stranger than sending her to Clara and the Doctor." Finally, Matilda understood what the conflict was, and she lost her grip on the bannister and nearly fell, stumbling. Silence fell in the room.

"Matts?" Rose called. She gritted her teeth and stepped into the living room, faced with the five of them: Jack, Rose, Ten, Clara and Thirteen. It was Thirteen who had been pacing, Clara and Jack both sitting down. Rose had turned to cry into Ten's arms and he was holding her tightly. Rose sniffed, "Sorry, did we wake you? Were you asleep?" She nodded slowly.

"…Why do mum and dad want me to live with Clara?"

"We don't know, sweetheart," Clara said softly, "We're just talking about it. Don't worry, nobody's going to make you do anything you don't want to do."

"Is that the Wills?" she pointed at Jack, who was reading over various pieces of paper in his lap, "Where did you get those?"

"They were in the glove compartment of the car, I'm the Executor," he explained, "They have… they have funeral instructions. I need to read over them. Look, we really don't have to do this now. You can go back to bed, and-"

"No," said Mattie, "I want to know what it says." Why wouldn't they have told her about this? She had always assumed… well, she didn't know what she had assumed. Rose lived on the TARDIS, Jack travelled constantly with Ianto Jones, and she knew her parents had always tried their hardest to keep her away from all that.

"It appoints Clara and the Twelfth Doctor your legal guardians provided they still live in Brighton. Both Wills do, they're nearly identical except for more instructions about what your mother wants Tish to have. It just doesn't say _why_. We all thought it would be Rose. Apart from that, all their possessions become your property when you turn sixty in short-years and eighteen in long-years." Feeling the numbness returning to her, Mattie shuffled towards the unoccupied sofa and sat down. Still, she held Rose's tissue. At the moment, she was fifty in short-years and roughly fifteen in long-years. Jack sighed, "There is one thing that might explain it. There was a letter."

"What?"

"It's addressed to you. I haven't opened it. If you don't want to read it now, though, that's fine. It'll be hard."

"…Where?" she asked. The instability of her immediate and potentially also her long-term future was panicking her a great deal. How could she do anything if she didn't even know where she was meant to live? Who with, and how? Jack took out an envelope from his stack of documents and showed it to her. She held out her hand, "Can I see?"

"Are you sure?"

"No. But…" she kept her hand outstretched, "More time won't make it easier…" He gave it to her. Her mother's handwriting: _Matilda_ , the front read. She opened it very carefully so that she didn't accidentally tear the paper within. She unfolded it gingerly, and began to read:

 _Dear Mattie,_

 _It breaks my heart to know that soon you'll be reading these words as much as your heart must be broken now without us. But no parent wants to outlive their child, so if you're in the world on your own it means we did something right and we kept you safe. You're our whole universe, but I know you'll be angry at us for not being there. Eternal life and eternal youth aren't for everybody, and sometimes parts of your humanity can be lost in the process. Neither of us want that to happen, and it's our choice not to be brought back, and we're trusting you to make sure nobody has the idea to resurrect us. We don't want that, and we're sorry, but I know you'll be okay._

 _You'll want to know why our Wills, which were revised just before I'm writing this for you now, name Clara as your legal guardian and not Rose. The reason is because they'll offer you stability and a safe home. We don't want you on the TARDIS until you're old enough to make the decision for yourself, if that's what you want, and you know this already. They'll take care of you in Brighton, we trust them, and Earth is the best place for you. With them in the school, you could even get your qualifications and become a surgeon. If Clara takes care of you as well as she takes care of her own Echoes, I know she'll do anything to keep you safe. Make sure that Rose knows she's the best godmother to you we could ever wish for._

 _You're going to be wonderful and whatever you do, we'll always be proud of you, and you're always going to be out little girl no matter where we are. We love you with all our hearts, but like the Doctor says, everything has its time, and everything ends. The Doctor was right. Clara and Rose have forever just like you, though, and the Doctor knows how to take care of a Time Lord. Try not to remember us being weak and sick; your dad keeps all his digital home videos on a flash drive in our room if you ever need help. I'm too weak to write any more but I hope you understand the decisions we've made, all with you in the centre._

 _All our love until the end of time,_

 _Mum & Dad XOXO_

It was hard for Mattie to stop her tears from dripping down and ruining the paper, which she now thought was the most fragile and valuable thing in the world. She dropped the page on the sofa next to her and covered her eyes with her hands.

"Can I read it, Matilda?" Jack asked in hardly more than a whisper. She mumbled something and heard him lean over and take the page, the ghost of her mother's voice reading those words echoing in her head.

"Here, take these," Rose sat next to her and gave her a fistful of new tissues before pulling her close again.

"They wanted you to know," she tried to say through her tears, "That you're the best godmother that they could have wished for. That's what it says." Rose hugged her warmly, the most significant constant in her life outside of Mickey and Martha. They were right, Rose would always be there, she would never have to say goodbye to her godparents. Maybe that was something she could cling to.

"She only wrote this a few days ago," Jack said after reading it carefully, then he asked her, "Is it okay to show it to Clara?" Clara looked up at mention of her name, and Mattie got the impression she felt like she didn't belong somehow.

"Yeah." Clara walked across the room to see the letter next, but she didn't look at it for more than a few seconds.

"This seems private," she said, "I'm not sure-"

"Mum says she trusts you to look after me," Mattie explained. It _was_ quite personal, her mother's real last words and possibly some of her last coherent thoughts.

"They want her to carry on living on Earth in a stable home environment," Jack said, "Where she can get some formal qualifications and stay protected at school. And more specifically, Clara, that she puts her faith in you after seeing how you protect your duplicates." Then he turned to Rose, and the silent Ten behind her (the Doctors were both being very quiet), "They wouldn't want to make you two start a new life on Earth."

"But, Matts, it's really up to you," Clara interjected, "You can take some time to think about it."

"What are you saying? You don't want her?" Rose argued.

"I'm completely sure I speak for both of us when I say we're honoured to be her legal guardians."

"Of course we are," Thirteen confirmed, still pacing, "She's more than welcome, if that's what she wants." Mattie didn't know what she wanted.

Actually, that was a lie: she wanted her parents. Outside of that… everything was blurry. The world was a radio she couldn't quite tune to the right band, leaving everything muffled. People pressed her for her thoughts and opinions, and while she heard them, she couldn't bring herself to listen.

Clara spoke to her again, "The important thing, darling, is that nobody's going to rush you. We all want what's best for you, I promise, so take as much time as you need." Them trying _not_ to pressure her into thinking about her options somehow felt worse than if they were desperate for an immediate answer. She felt as though she were stuck between a rock and a hard place. She didn't reply to Clara, who shortly went and sat back down in her arm chair, brushing Thirteen's arm on the way past and whispering something about how she should try not to pace as much. Thirteen crossed her arms tightly and perched on the armrest of the chair, bouncing her foot up and down instead.

"Maybe you should go back upstairs," Jack advised, "Get some more sleep."

"What are the funeral instructions?" Mattie asked thickly, feeling the snot building up in her nose after so much crying and trying not to cry. Rose, whose shoulder she was still leaning on, was the same.

"You don't have to-" Jack began.

"I want to," she cut him off. She didn't want to, but she also didn't like them telling her how she was feeling. 'You don't have to' translated, in Matilda's mind, to 'we don't want you to,' or 'we don't think you can handle it,' or 'you're not grown-up enough.' But her parents were already gone and she had been there in the room when it happened, suddenly alone; how much more bubble-wrap did they want to cushion her in?

"The service is going to be at a church in London," Jack explained after some hesitation. She knew they had never much liked Newport.

"They're… I mean, they… they wanted to be cremated. Dad said to me before, a while ago."

"Yeah, that's what it says. We're going to honour their wishes, don't worry. Down to the letter." Their wishes were that Matilda go try to continue to live a 'normal' life in on the mainland, not that her life of constantly travelling, hiding, and trying not to interact with anybody outside of her parents' immediate social circle of pseudo-immortals was what she would consider normal. But it wasn't like she didn't remember the events of her eighteenth birthday, which had proven to her – resentful as she sometimes was – the necessity of all their precautions. "It'll be your decision what to do with the ashes. Your father also asked me, last week, to do the eulogy." Mattie wished they had shared more of their preparations with her, if they had been making them. Couldn't mum have told her in person about the decision regarding living arrangements? But then, they probably didn't want her to entertain the prospect that they might not leave the hospital.

"Don't make it too sad. They wouldn't want everybody to be sad."

"Sure," Jack managed a smile, "There's plenty of good things to talk about, don't worry."

"I… might go back upstairs." There were unanimous mumbles from all the adults that they thought that was a very good idea. She didn't have anything else to say to them, anyway, and she didn't want to think anymore. It was probably good that Jack was taking care of funeral arrangements, that it was all already organised. She left Rose's side with her new, fresher tissues, and for the second time trudged upstairs.

This time, however, she went to her own room first and finally managed to change into pyjamas. Peeling away her clothes felt like shedding a layer of skin, like she was giving something up by performing this arbitrary action. Dad would tell her she was being ridiculous, though, and that she couldn't wear the same clothes forever just for the artificial sense of feeling closer to them. She still couldn't bring herself to put them in the laundry basket and instead folded up the dirty garments and left them on the edge of her own bed, at which point she crept across the landing to go back to the other room. At least she remembered to take her glasses off this time.

 **AN: This is more or less the saddest chapter of this storyline (which, like "Brighton Rock", has 6 chapters), and there will be some actual monster-of-the-week stuff, in case anyone's worried I've written 40,000 words of mundane and depressing funeral planning. Finally, please forgive me for killing off Mickey & Martha, I do love them both and Martha especially so it was all quite upsetting to write as well as to read!**


	8. Nowhere Girl - Chapter 2

_Nowhere Girl_

 _2_

Fog curdled in the bleak air and delicate dewdrops sparkled on the summer grass. For July it was more than a little chilly, Clara wearing her coat as she stood outside the old cottage smoking. A month and a half she had gone without smoking a real cigarette, and that one had been a brief lapse caused by their minor transition to the previous century, but now she had given up again. She blew out a thin stream of smoke into the cold morning; it was half past eight and the sun had been up for hours but was obscured by heavy grey clouds. Nearby was one lonely TARDIS, Ten's TARDIS, which he had picked them up in from Brighton in the middle of the night. Jenny was still in possession of Thirteen's ship, and Jenny and her ilk had yet to hear the news.

Only shortly after she had left to satiate her stress-induced nicotine craving was she joined by somebody else.

"I thought you didn't want to be near me if I was having 'one of those things'?" she quipped when her wife opened the backdoor and stepped out. On all sides they were surrounded by dense forests, a good few miles outside of the civilisation of Newport, the largest city on the whole island. There were villages here and there, but nothing within walking distance, and very bad internet signal to say it was the middle of the 21st Century. The Doctor didn't say anything. "It's cold out today. I don't think it was this cold at home." The Isle of Wight was relatively close to Brighton, only sixty miles away and practically horizontal to one another.

"The UK is a microclimate," she said, "With notoriously inconsistent weather. Maybe it's a bit of subliminal pathetic fallacy."

"Maybe," Clara sighed. She was still quite tired after being awoken at five in the morning after a frantic and incoherent phone call from Rose Tyler, the phone promptly being taken by Captain Jack who explained to them calmly that the worst had happened, Mickey and Martha had died in hospital together. She'd been trying not to think about it for the last two weeks or so, assuming that the medicine of the future would save them, but… "Do you think they were young?"

"Everybody's young to me."

"You know what I mean, though," Clara implored, "Eighty and seventy-eight? Life expectancy is over a hundred for most people these days."

"Oh, but at what cost? Nobody's ever ready to say goodbye to someone they love, no matter how long it's been."

"Only in our lives could the simple act of dying be considered so controversial…"

"Time's no measure of having lived a full life. Would you want to live forever if you didn't have the Echoes?" Thirteen pointed out the end of the shiny scar that snaked across the back of Clara's left hand, which she was holding her cigarette with, and which continued up the whole length of her arm.

"I'd have you," said Clara, self-consciously switching the cigarette into the other hand and letting the sleeve of her coat hang down, "And there's still Matilda."

"Coo," she lowered her voice considerably now, "They weren't going to get better. We know that, we visited this weekend and… it was heart-breaking. That's why Jack and Rose have been staying here with her all this time, which – well – isn't really a permanent solution. Everything has its time, and everything ends. And everyone has to say goodbye to their parents."

"I know, it's just at her age, and I remember what it was like when mum died, but this was _both_ her parents, and she doesn't even really have anybody else."

"She's still got her godparents. And us, apparently. We'll all be there for her if she wants us."

The Tenth Doctor opened the door and they both stepped aside as he came hurrying out, midway through putting his coat on and looking sombre. Well, how else would he look? None of them were anywhere close to being happy, and Clara felt like none of the others were even calm. Her wife kept fidgeting with everything, after all, which she only did when she was especially antsy.

"Something happening?" Clara asked him.

"I'm going out to break the news," Ten said, stopping on his way to his TARDIS, "Do something useful, at least. Better to do it in person, don't you think? Than over the phone? Nobody's spoken to Tish and the cousins yet." If he was volunteering for that grisly task, then Clara certainly wasn't going to try and stop him.

"I'll tell Jenny," Thirteen offered.

"But I was-"

"I said, I'll tell her," she said firmly.

Fifty years and she remained the only Doctor to actually get into Jenny's good books. Well, along with Tentoo, but Thirteen had a bad habit of getting very annoyed when people included Tentoo among the list of Doctors. Though his human physiology had seen him go the same way as Mickey and Martha now had a dozen or so years ago. Ten just nodded, visibly irritated by Thirteen, and finished sorting out his coat as he stole away to the ship. Rose would be fine as long as Jack didn't leave, too. The TARDIS thrummed and disappeared.

"I hope that didn't wake Mattie up," Thirteen muttered.

Clara smoked some more, her mind elsewhere, "Yeah… do you think she'll come with us? Mattie?"

"I don't know. Maybe she won't want to. Rose would move to Earth to look after her, I'm sure; Mattie's her whole world."

"We should probably get a room ready, though," Clara began, after thinking, "For whatever she decides. You keep saying you want to do renovations."

"Transdimensional renovations, though, and you keep putting off discussing that."

"I just wasn't sure there was a need for it, but now, well, the loft's a conversion and it's full of stuff from the TARDIS. If we cleared that out it'd be a good bedroom, don't you think?" The Doctor said nothing. "It's just a good idea to talk about this sooner rather than later."

"I guess. I don't know."

"Good distraction?"

"Distractions aren't always a good thing when you're grieving, they'll just cause stutters in the process."

"Sweetheart…"

"Let's just see what she says, what she wants." Clara's cigarette had almost run down now, so she dropped it onto the small, concrete patio and stubbed it out under the sole of her boot.

"Okay," she smiled somewhat sadly, taking the Doctor's hand. Clara had been about to make a particularly bad joke, as she always did when she was in an unpleasant or uncomfortable situation, about how this wasn't the way she had wanted their summer to go, but the noise of a twig snapping somewhere in the woods cut through the air. They paused. "What was that?"

"Probably just wildlife," said the Doctor.

Simultaneously, hundreds of birds all took off from within the trees. Being as it was midsummer, that was a _lot_ of birds. Cawing and screeching they fled into the gloomy skies above from all around the lonely cottage. Then, something appeared from between the dark trees in a blur and scared the life out of Clara, who actually shrieked and grabbed tighter hold of the Doctor. The miscellaneous object struck the kitchen window right behind them and made the glass shake until it dropped to the ground. Clara was horrified to see it was a dead cat.

"Hey!" she shouted, taking off towards the trees. But the Doctor held her back, staring at the darkness ahead of them. It may have been the daytime and the sun was in the sky, but the flock of fleeing birds made the shadows dance between dense tree-line. Promptly, the backdoor was practically kicked down by Jack and Rose arriving.

"What was that!?" Rose demanded.

"Uh…" Clara faltered, still semi attempting to go towards the woods.

" _That_ just hit the window," Thirteen explained, "After all the birds flew off." The birds were still swarming above them but beginning to dissipate. Something had definitely spooked them.

"Did you see something?" Jack asked Clara, her eyes still fixed on the trees.

"No," she answered after thinking for a second, "Nothing. The fog's too thick." Rose crouched down to peer at the dead cat. It was a ginger tabby, certainly not wild, though it didn't have a collar. Around its ears and cheeks Clara could see blood.

"It _hit_ the window?" she asked, "You mean like, something threw it?"

"I don't like this," said Jack, following Clara's gaze, though the cat-killing assailant remained hidden.

"Really? Because I'm _thrilled_ ," Clara said sarcastically. Rose glared at her.

"We don't need this today…"

"Go back inside," Jack ordered Clara and the Doctor, "Rose and I will go look."

"What? Why you?" Clara questioned, the Doctor still holding onto her arm to stop her from going off, "Surely it should be me and Rose. We're the most powerful."

"Yes, that's why one of you goes into the woods and the other stays at the house."

"It'll be fine, I already stopped a drunk driver last night," Rose said, getting up and stepping away from the cat. "Probably just a badger. They can get nasty." Clara highly doubted that a badger had thrown a cat out of the woods so hard that it died on impact against the wall of the house. She doubted that badgers could throw anything at all, since they didn't have thumbs.

"Coo, just… come on," Thirteen tugged on her arm again, Jack and Rose apparently waiting for some sort of go-ahead from Clara. Or rather and assurance that she wasn't going to follow them and be an annoyance.

"Keep us posted," Clara said, "We'll stay with Mattie."

"We'll be, like, five minutes," Rose said, then motioned for Jack to follow her. He drew out his gun (had he taken that with him to the hospital?) and the pair of them walked off in the direction the cat had come from. The birds had mostly finished her escape by now, and Thirteen pulled Clara back indoors by her hand.

The last time they had been in Mickey and Martha's house had been the previous Christmas. She and the Doctor had begun visiting them on Christmas Day once they had moved to the Isle of Wight, meaning the festive season was potentially lonely as every subsequent move made it harder and harder for Martha's family to visit. Of course, Rose was always there though, every week or more without fail. As the end of their lives drew in, Clara didn't think that they had ever really gone wanting for company.

There was a bloody mark on the kitchen window. Clara watched the shapes of Jack and Rose disappear into the trees and then kept watching for a few more seconds, but saw and heard nothing else of note.

"It _is_ chilly," Clara reiterated to her wife.

"Heating probably isn't on. It is July, after all."

"I'm gonna go turn on the boiler."

"Just leave it."

"No," she sighed, "I need something to do."

The boiler was in the ice-cold downstairs toilet, situated right next to the back door so that the breeze from outside swept in and made it a very unpleasant place to be. It was also full of spiders, and the boiler controls were high enough that Clara had to stand on her tip-toes to work out what they were. How had Mattie and Martha dealt with that? Mattie took after her mother in terms of height, after all. After a good few minutes of fidgeting she finally managed to get it to work, she hoped, and left to find the Doctor pacing up and down again.

"How are you doing?" Clara asked now they were somewhat alone, Matilda fast asleep upstairs.

"I don't know," she shook her head, "I'm just… all over the place."

"I think it just gets weirder. People dying."

"'Weird'? That's the word you choose?"

"When they're the people we used to live with, yeah. It's strange, like… in some ways it really does feel like a lifetime ago, but other ways it seems like just yesterday that it was all of us, and now… the numbers keep getting smaller."

"Welcome to my world. Deep down though, I'm selfish."

"Why are you selfish?"

"Every time one of our old friends dies, it just makes me think I'm lucky that I'll always have you. And you've really been through the ringer, there's not a lot that you can't survive."

"That's true, I did get shot in the head a few years ago. Anyway, you know I don't stick around for you, I stick around for my clones. And now Matilda as well, apparently… do you fancy a cup of tea? Matts won't mind if I make some tea, will she?"

"I don't think so. I'd love one, honestly. It's been a long night."

As with the boiler, it took Clara a while to navigate the kitchen, seeing as nothing was where she was used to it being, especially when she still felt a little like she was in a daze from being woken up in the middle of the night with the news of tragic deaths. Willing the kettle to be a little quieter as it boiled so that Matilda got some much-needed rest, Clara eventually brewed their drinks and carried them over to the sofa, handing a mug to the Doctor. They settled in to wait for Jack and Rose's return.

Unfortunately, Jack and Rose's return did not come. Nor did they hear the TARDIS come back. Clara and Thirteen didn't have any particularly exciting conversation while they waited, and they both grew more and more uncomfortable as the minutes rolled by. First ten, twenty, half an hour, forty minutes – Clara began obsessively checking her phone. But no news. When it got to half past nine she tried to give Rose a call, after all, they couldn't be wasting time wandering around in the woods. If there was nothing to find, they ought to come back; Jack's collection of papers had been left on the coffee table. Mickey and Martha's Wills.

But Rose didn't answer the phone. The phone didn't even ring, just emitted a long beep like the line had been completely cut off. In that decade, it was very rare for a phone not to have signal. You could be in the middle of the ocean or the dessert and the satellite coverage for everybody would make any phone call crystal clear, not to mention that Clara's phone was modified by the Doctor. It was able to make a call anywhere and anywhen in all of space and time, as was Rose's.

"Listen to this," she said, giving the Doctor the phone to listen. The Doctor had nothing to say, however; she didn't know what it was, either.

"Strange…"

"Why would that happen? Something throws a cat at a house and the phones go dead?"

"Maybe it's a joke?" she suggested.

"A _joke_?" Clara asked incredulously, "Played by who? Today of all days?" The Doctor didn't have an answer. She couldn't even work out what was wrong with the signal, yet no matter how many times Clara tried to ring Rose _or_ Jack when she moved on to him, the issue persisted.

"Try to call someone else," the Doctor implored, "Call, I don't know, 111? Or 101?" The numbers for the NHS and the police non-emergency helplines. They should _always_ be available; however, Clara was faced with the same problem: no connection. As a last resort she attempted 999 for the actual emergency services dispatcher, and still: dead. "Maybe it's your phone, maybe the sim's burned out, or something." Thirteen took Clara's phone and slid her screwdriver out of the belt on her jeans it had been wedged in. She scanned for a while, Clara watching, then held the phone up to her ear and shook it like she was listening for something. "Hold on… if I can _just_ …" The Doctor dialled Rose's number again and sonicked it while it rang, the device on speaker.

A shrill ringing pierced the air, so high-pitched and unpleasant that the Doctor dropped the phone instantly on the floor, flinching like it had burned her.

"Turn it off!" Clara shouted at her, her ears pounding in tremendous pain, hands clamped over her head. The phone fell and Thirteen accidentally kicked it under the sofa, diving after it and struggling to grab it and hang up the line. After the noise ended Clara still heard the ringing distinctly and snatched her phone away from the Doctor. "What did you do?"

"I just amplified it, that's all," she said, "I thought I heard interference."

"And?"

"And that was the interference, that noise."

"Well, what is it? Something messing with my phone?"

"I don't think it's your phone specifically, if I had to guess. Oh, crap – you're bleeding!"

"What?" Clara was alarmed. The Doctor reached for the box of tissues on the table, the one Rose had spent most of the night pilfering to mop up her tears, and pushed Clara's head to the side, brushing her hair out of the way.

"Did your eardrums burst? They're bleeding," she explained, wiping away the blood. It was Clara's right ear, the one that had been closest to the phone; the other ear seemed okay when Clara touched it gently. Over the echoing tinnitus Clara heard movement upstairs, a thud. The Doctor glanced up for a second before resuming her first aid.

"Stupid noise must have woken her up," Clara muttered.

"I didn't know it was going to do that," Thirteen said defensively. Clara winced, her ear throbbing.

"Will the nanogenes heal this, do you think?"

"Not sure, but the damage doesn't seem too bad," the Doctor said, though she didn't have a light or an otoscope with which to examine Clara's ear properly. Nor was she remotely qualified. "Hasn't bled _too_ much, just a trickle. Not as bad as a nosebleed."

Matilda came thundering down the steps alarmingly loudly and was only part of the way through putting her glasses back on when she came into the living room in pyjamas.

"What was that?" she asked, staring at them.

"It was, uh…" the Doctor began, letting go of Clara now that she was satisfied the bleeding had just about stopped, "Cellular interference from an unknown source. Are your ears bleeding?"

"I don't think so – what's going on? Where's Jack and Rose?"

"Great question," said the Doctor, and then she didn't answer, she looked imploringly at Clara instead, like Clara held the answer. _She_ didn't know where Jack and Rose were, and so stayed silent and useless, checking her phone again. "Where's your landline? Do you have a landline?"

"It's just…" Mattie lifted up her arm slightly to point at the TV stand, the house phone lying next to it. The Doctor made a beeline for it.

"Don't you put that on speaker," Clara warned her.

"Who are you calling?" Mattie persisted.

"Emergency services," the Doctor explained.

"Why?"

"See if I get through…"

"Matilda," Clara diverted her attention away from the Doctor and her phone shenanigans, "You don't have a cat, do you…?"

"No."

"Have you ever seen a ginger tabby around here?"

"Dammit!" the Doctor exclaimed, interrupting before Mattie could answer, "Line's dead."

"But it doesn't use a phone line, it uses satellites, just like all phones do," Mattie said, "How can that be dead? How can all the satellites not be working? Would one of you just-" She cut herself off mid-sentence, bawling up her fists and pressing them into her eyes.

"Hey, hey," Clara said softly, leaving the sofa to go over to her, "The truth is that we don't know. There's something strange going on and we don't have any of the answers. We're not keeping things from you, I promise."

"Strange how?" she asked hoarsely. She had only just woken up and she was already on the brink of more tears…

"Come with me."

"Don't show her the cat, Coo," the Doctor said.

"Why not? She might know where it came from."

"It came from the woods."

"What cat? A ginger cat?" Mattie persisted. Clara ignored her wife and left her there fidgeting with the handset, leading Matilda to the back door of her own house. Outside, the cat was still exactly where they had left it. "Oh my god. That's Church, I think. It's Mrs Ward's cat."

"Church?" Clara frowned.

"Short for something, I don't know."

"He got thrown out of the trees. Over there," Clara pointed at the spot where the cat had come from, where Jack and Rose had vanished into. "Have you ever seen or heard anything strange since you moved here?"

" _Threw him_?" Mattie asked in disbelief, crouching down to look at the cat.

"Yeah, after scaring all the birds off. Hit the window where the mark is. Me and the Doctor were standing right here, too – barely missed us."

"Didn't you see anything?"

"Not really."

"I can't say this has happened before. But…" Completely unfazed by the corpse, she knelt on the damp ground in her pyjamas and looked closer, "I think he looks thinner. Like, he used to be quite fat. But it's definitely Church because he this a scar on his nose. And look at that blood, in his ear, plus…"

"No – _no_ , sweetheart, don't do – oh…" Clara had failed to stop Matilda from carefully pulling open the dead cat's eyelid, revealing its eyes were bloodied and burst as well. She had always been morbid, Clara supposed, and had yet to stop dedicatedly pursuing a career in surgery or some form of medicine. The blood was certainly strange, though; when she'd seen the cat earlier she'd assumed the blood had been because it had been bashed against the wall, but now it was all looking a bit more sinister. "Matts, stop touching it." Mattie ignored her and lifted its head. "You are grim, honestly…"

"Look at that!" she pointed out where its skull was broken, "Barely any blood there. It was already dead when it hit the window." Maybe that made sense, Clara thought, since they hadn't seen it move or heard it yowl or cry in pain.

"Who's Mrs Ward?" Clara asked.

"Our neighbour. Sort of. She lives a mile and a half down the road, Church always wanders up here and mum has me take him all the way back. He scratches. Or… he used to scratch… she shouts at me every time and says we feed him and that's why he wanders off. But obviously we don't feed him because mum's allergic." She finally stopped touching it. "What's going on? This is really weird. Someone threw a _dead cat_ at my _house_."

"Yeah…" Clara said, but she wasn't exactly a stranger to the weird and unusual. She crossed her arms before she next spoke, preferring not to have to tell Matilda about their other problem. "Jack and Rose went into the woods to see what happened. An hour ago. And now none of the phones are working. That high-pitched noise is what we heard when I tried to call her." Matilda silenced and tried to touch her face, at which point Clara held her wrists with telekinesis. "Don't do that. Go in and wash your hands, Matts. In fact, wash them twice. Three times. Disinfect them."

"Church doesn't have any diseases."

"It's a dead animal, go clean your hands," Clara told her, doing her teacher-voice. Matilda clearly did not appreciate that, and while she listened to Clara she did so very huffily, dragging her feet across the floor as she re-entered the house and went towards the sink. Clara watched her closely to make sure she was _very_ thorough and used plenty of soap.

"Internet's not working either," announced Thirteen, breaking the silence.

"The cat was bleeding out of its eyes and ears," Clara told her.

"It _had been_ bleeding out of its eyes and ears," Mattie corrected her, "It's been dead for a while."

"A while? How long? Hours, days?" the Doctor began to think.

"Uh… I don't really know. Not long enough to decompose."

"Okay, so, the neighbour's cat – what?" Clara began, "Wanders into the woods down here, bleeds to death through its ears, and then a day later gets its corpse thrown at a house?"

"Potentially."

"And Jack and Rose go missing," Matilda added quietly.

"Jack and Rose will be fine," Clara said, "Neither of them really has a choice in the matter."

"But they're _supposed_ to be, like, invincible!" Mattie argued quite animatedly, getting soap suds on Clara by accident as she protested. "…Sorry." She rinsed her hands. "Nobody's _meant_ to be able to get them."

"Jack's constantly getting into trouble, I wouldn't worry about him too much," Thirteen said, "Very regularly gets himself kidnapped by all kinds of people. And Rose? She likes to make everybody think that she has all the secrets of the universe at her fingertips, but she's more like… a vessel. The time vortex uses her to make sure things happen the way they're supposed to, and she can only really manipulate the one universe."

"Only one measly universe," Clara quipped, "They'll be alright, Matts. Now – go get dressed, yeah? Go put some fresh clothes on and then we'll go and see this Mrs Ward and tell her about her cat. You'll need to give us directions."

"I don't really want to go out anywhere or get dressed…"

"I know, but it's dangerous here, and we all need to keep each other safe until we can work out what's going on." Clara really didn't want to come across like she was bossing Matilda around or trying to rush in to fill the vacuum of Mickey and Martha, but she was struggling to work out how she should talk to Matilda as opposed to all the other teenagers she looked after every day. Thankfully, while Clara was the teacher often derided for being much too strict, the Doctor was beloved by all, and it was she who now stepped in.

"Mattie, if the phones don't work, we can't contact the TARDIS. You can't go there to stay safe, and we can't stay here when Ten and Rose might need our help. Trust me when I say we both understand what you're going through, we've been through it too, and this is the last thing any of us want to be doing. But they're still your godparents and they might need us." Mattie didn't say a word, and after a few moments she gave them a small nod and then shuffled away. She left them in the main room and trudged up the gloomy stairs alone, leaving Clara and the Doctor behind.

Clara put her hands in front of her face and took a few deep breaths once Mattie was gone, sitting down on the sofa again.

"This must be the hardest day of her life."

"It might the hardest day of her life, period," the Doctor came to sit next to her, "Which means that, well… it can only get better, right?"

"Maybe…" Clara sighed, "I just… she's right, about Jack and Rose. Maybe they're fine, it's not like we heard anybody scream."

"If Jack and Rose are fine then we're just going to have taken a little detour to tell a woman that her cat has unfortunately died," said Thirteen, "Try not to make it out to be more than it is."

"What do _you_ think?" Clara implored. The Doctor took a while to answer, clearly debating how honest she should be. Clara thought she might prefer it if the Doctor lied to her to make her feel better.

"It's not exactly the wilderness out here. Those woods aren't big at all. This entire _island_ isn't that big. If you walk long enough in any direction you'll get to the coast, and then there's an entire National Trust maintained footpath around the edge. Not that I've ever even known Rose to get lost since she got those superpowers. Plus, Mattie's right about the phones all using satellite coverage. Nobody ever loses signal in this day and age, which concerns me. And even without signal we should still be able to connect to the emergency services."

"And the dead cat that got thrown at the house?"

"Well, yeah. That too. Was she upset about seeing it?"

"No, thank god. She kept touching it. Seems like something you would do, to be honest. Maybe more so Eleven than you, he would have just picked it up, I bet," said Clara, a sliver of nostalgia for her 'deceased' husband coming back to her. "God… why does this have to happen now? Why today? And without us even being able to take her anywhere safe… I just…"

"What?" The Doctor took Clara's hands and Clara breathed deeply once again before continuing.

"What if this screws her up?" Clara lowered her voice considerably, "Like, really badly, I mean? Oswin was seventeen when the cracks started to show. And mum died when I was sixteen and I still have the dreams sometimes."

"Coo… nobody goes through life without bad things happening to them. _Really_ bad things. There's no one alive who's unscathed. And she's _fifty_ , they died of natural causes to do with old age. I'm not saying that that isn't the most heart-breaking thing in the world, or that grief is any kind of competition, but I don't think she's going to lose her mind. Besides, this is Matilda we're talking about; she got kidnapped by Daleks when she was, like, five and has never seemed particularly traumatised." Clara leant her head on the Doctor's. "What about you? Are _you_ gonna be okay?"

"Urgh, it's like… Like I haven't had a chance to even take it in, or… or maybe it's a long time coming, so it's not… I don't know. _I don't know_. It's all a mess and this definitely isn't going to help anybody." She moved away.

"In over a thousand years I still haven't found a way to make it all feel better. I'm sorry."

"No, no. You haven't got anything to apologise for, sweetheart." Neither of them had much more to say. They were stuck in the middle of a mystery yet again while simultaneously trying to mourn the painful loss of two of their oldest, closest friends. "But… the haemorrhaging… doesn't it sound familiar? And what do you think about the weather now? I did say it was chilly."

"Could be nothing. Could be a weird disease, a microclimate, maybe Jack and Rose are just being super meticulous. Maybe a satellite has had a freak malfunction, and nobody knows about it because, obviously, with the satellite down, they can't get any news out." Clara doubted all of those theories, but it was the Doctor's way of admitting she didn't know anything without actually having to admit she didn't know anything. "I hope this woman's not too upset about her cat."

"Well, we'll just tell her it got run over, I suppose," said Clara, "I'm not a fan of cats."

"I know, you're not a fan of any animals. _That_ reminds me – did you feed Captain Nemo before we left?"

"No, did you forget?"

"Darn it…"

"I'm sure he'll be fine."

"Who'll be fine?"

Mattie interrupted them, having come downstairs incredibly quietly for once. Clara had the sneaking suspicion she had been careful so that she could try and catch them eavesdropping about this or that – teenagers did so enjoy the idea that everybody else was having a much more interesting time than them.

"The lobster," Clara explained.

"Lobster?"

"We have a pet lobster," Clara continued, "The Doctor 'rescued' him from a restaurant."

"I couldn't just leave him there to die, Clara," Thirteen argued.

"You could've, because he was the last lobster they had, and _I_ was really looking forward to having lobster for tea…"

"You have literally no empathy for living creatures."

"That's a bit much. I was just hungry."

"He's blue, Clara! You can't eat something that's _blue_. He's too cool to be eaten. And I did let you name him. See, Mattie, _I_ wanted to name him Trotsky, but Clara was all, 'that's a stupid name for a lobster.'"

"It _is_ a stupid name for a lobster," Clara muttered, "Look, this isn't important, we'd better go. I'll leave a note on the coffee table just in case Jack and Rose come back." She stood to do this, though she thought the likelihood of them coming back was slim to none; she had a very bad feeling about the whole day so far but didn't know how much of that was grief and how much might be genuine intuition.

"Why keep it and not release it?" Matilda asked the Doctor.

"He's cute!"

"He's not cute," Clara said, scribbling a note on the nearest thing she could find, which happened to be a sheet of kitchen towel and not an actual piece of paper, "He bit my finger off and ate it."

"And now we have chainmail gloves for cleaning the tank. Lessons were learned. And if you'd let me get a dog-"

"You're not getting a dog," Clara said firmly without looking up from where she was going over her writing half a dozen times just to get the ink to stay legible. How many times had they argued about getting a dog? She couldn't count.

"You liked Laika."

"I remember Laika," said Matilda. She must have roughly resembled age ten when they'd had Laika the space dog, decades ago now. They'd brought Laika to visit Mattie, Mickey and Martha before, a few times. It was good for her to get exercise outside of the ship, after all. Funny how Clara so adamantly refused to get any kind of pet – and really would rather they didn't have Captain Nemo – and now they had a teenage girl to look after. But at least teenage girls didn't need to be taken on walks three times a day, nor did they make a habit of pooing wherever they liked. Those were her main issues with dogs.

"Can we use your car, Mattie?" Clara tried to get the Doctor away from reminiscing about a dog that had died nearly twenty years ago, "I'd rather not walk out in the open with so much going on."

"Jack's got the keys."

"We'll be alright without the keys, if you don't mind me driving it?" Thirteen had her sonic screwdriver, after all.

"Yeah, I guess," said Mattie.

"Great. Then let's go."


	9. Nowhere Girl - Chapter 3

_Nowhere Girl_

 _3_

Mattie had insisted they bring Church along with them on their way to break the news to Mrs Ward. She knew Mrs Ward and didn't want to have to make two trips, one to announce the death of her beloved cat and another to deliver the body of said cat. She was a crabby old lady, and Mattie didn't say that lightly; she had nothing against old people, of course, not after watching her parents age so quickly compared to her and having to look after them. But their neighbour was simply not very personable, despite Matilda's best efforts and constantly returning the cat every time he ran away. It was wrapped in a towel in the boot.

She was trying not to think about her parents, though. She'd dreamt about them in her second bout of sleeping and that had been painful enough, waking up to remember that her dad's ghostly words of comfort had come from her own mind entirely. That he would never speak words of comfort to her again. Did that make her a bad person, trying not to think about them? But surely she couldn't just wallow, could she? She couldn't just… stop. Cease to function. Or was that more normal? Should she crawl into bed for weeks and stay there until one day finding the strength to get back to being herself? Announcing the death of Church wasn't going to help take her mind off her circumstances too much, though.

At least she had seized the passenger seat, with the Doctor in the back and Clara driving, after they had argued about how the Doctor wanted to drive but apparently didn't possess a driver's license. Not that Clara driving her parents' car was legal, either, since she wasn't insured for it. She would get fined quite a lot of money if they got into an accident, but then again, surely any money would come straight back to Matilda now, if everything had become hers… but the rural backroad between her house and Mrs Ward's was scarcely patrolled by traffic officers. It didn't even have any speed cameras that she had ever noticed. Suffice it to say, they didn't get arrested in the five-minute journey, Clara turning into Mrs Ward's empty driveway.

That house had always unnerved Matilda. Mrs Ward was one of those types who kept newspapers plastered all over the windows, blocking out the world and as much light as she could. She'd never been inside that house, even after offering to help out or make a cup of tea after returning Church, which she was secretly glad about. Mum and dad had never understood just how _creepy_ the woman was. The building's drains were blocked with old leaves and there was moss and ivy crawling up the walls. One of the windows was smashed and had been for the last few years they had lived there; she'd always wondered if it didn't get unbearably cold in the winter months.

Clara parked the car, leaning forwards on the dashboard and squinting up at the eerie cottage.

"Does she definitely live here?"

"Yeah," said Matilda, "It's creepy. I don't like it. But it's always looked like this, I guess."

"Let's just get out of here as soon as possible…" Clara murmured. And then what, Mattie thought? Go back to her empty house, sit around waiting for her missing godparents to return? Plan the funeral of her actual parents? Had they even contacted an undertaker yet? Were her parents' bodies still waiting, unclaimed, in the morgue of St Mary's? But then, she wasn't supposed to be thinking about that. She was supposed to be thinking about Mrs Ward and Church.

Clara and the Doctor got out of the car, leaving Mattie to get out last and brace herself. What if Mrs Ward asked her who Clara and the Doctor were? Why was Mattie being driven around by them? Would she have to tell her, would she have to say those words out loud and in full for the first time? _My parents are dead._ She hated it. She hated being somebody now whose parents were dead, trapped with the knowledge that she would always be that person now. A girl with dead parents.

For the time being they left Church in the boot, though Mattie wouldn't have minded carrying him too much. Dead things had never really bothered her, she used to collect dead butterflies when she was a little younger. The specimens were up in the loft somewhere now, but she still had them. And once, a very long time ago, she'd been gifted a taxidermy alien creature by Dr Cohen. That was buried upstairs in her other possessions, too, because mum had always been so worried a visitor might notice it. Not that they ever had any visitors who weren't in their immediate social circle, but she'd never liked getting into arguments with Martha. Mainly because she always won.

Clara knocked on the door.

Nothing. No answer.

She knocked again, and still, zilch. For nearly five minutes Clara kept knocking loudly and incessantly without hearing a a stir from within.

"Normally she shouts obscenities right away, she hates people knocking on the door. There's a sign on the garden wall telling the postman to leave everything in the letterbox," Mattie explained. That was why the letterbox was overflowing with bills to the point that they were in a heap in the mud, soggy and illegible after being rained on for god knows how long. Months, probably.

"Mrs Ward?" Clara pried open the metal slit of the letterbox to shout through it, "Mrs Ward, we've got your cat." She neglected to mention that the cat was, in fact, dead. But Mrs Ward _loved_ that cat, Mattie thought it was the only thing in the world she actually cared about; there was no way she _wouldn't_ come to the door. Unless… "Did you say the cat looked like it hadn't eaten for a while?" Perhaps Clara could read her mind.

"Well, yeah. You don't think…?" But Clara didn't answer her, she met the eyes of her wife.

"What say you? Risk it?" Risk what?

"Hold on – you don't mean to _break in_?" Matilda questioned.

"How old is this Mrs Ward?"

"I don't know – old? Old as mum and dad? Thereabouts? Seventy, eighty?" Mattie had never been good at guessing ages, probably due to her own unusual condition.

"Now, listen, Matilda," Clara began as the Doctor took out her screwdriver, "You should absolutely never, _ever_ break into somebody's house without their permission. Okay?" It was at that point that they broke into somebody's house without their permission, the Doctor unlocking the door with the device and letting it swing open.

A musty stench hit them like a wall. It was unbearably dark inside and stagnant, filth lining all the surfaces. But this wasn't really out of the ordinary for what Matilda had experienced of Mrs Ward.

"Maybe you should stay in the car, Matts," Clara said.

"No. What if something happens out here? I won't be able to text you," Matilda said, which was true, because her phone was not working, either. She didn't even _want_ to go snooping around Mrs Ward's house.

"Just… don't leave my sight, okay?" Mattie nodded. Already, Clara seemed to love bossing her around, which she wasn't too keen on. For the time being, however – given their unpleasant surroundings – she decided to just grin and bear it. She didn't really object too much to staying by Clara in the creepy house, anyway.

"Oh my _god_ …" the Doctor breathed when they entered the front room. It was full to the brim with junk. "She's, like, one of those hoarders."

"So're you," Clara told her.

"Shut up. This. Is. _Gross_." Matilda had to agree. It was stacked high with rubbish and it reeked, no light getting in through the newspapers, closed curtains, and mountains of unnecessary possessions. There were all sorts of strange things in there; Mattie saw at least two bicycles in the old living room and a pile of tyres, among a hefty collection of radios and televisions, most of which appeared to be broken. Even more old newspapers, old books, quite a lot of dead plants and a floor covered in a thick coating of cat hair and faeces; Mattie began to think maybe they shouldn't have kept returning Church to that squalor. If only her mother wasn't allergic.

Dust from the room stuck to the lenses of her glasses. Staying behind Clara, who had taken out her phone to switch on the torch and get a closer look at what was in there, she took them off and tried to clean them on the lining of her jacket. This rendered her unable to see, and she tripped over an old floor lamp lying across the right of way and bumped into a cardboard box sitting on a chair. It fell to the floor with a thud and a collection of old, mouldy photo albums spilled out.

"You okay?" Clara whispered.

"Just… tripped…" she mumbled, sliding her glasses back on. While the Doctor wandered off into the kitchen, Clara crouched down carefully to get a look at the albums. Mattie stayed with Clara, as instructed, and strained her ears to pick up on any noise at all that would betray Mrs Ward's presence. There was always the possibility she had gone into town for something, walked, maybe, and would be back any minute. Back to shout them out of her house and blame her for the death of her neglected cat, probably. The Doctor elsewhere, Mattie peered over Clara's shoulder as she flipped through the pages. "Why do you use telekinesis? Why not touch it?"

"Because it's totally grim in here," Clara said.

"Are you a germaphobe?"

" _No_."

"Are you sure?"

"Does she have any family, do you know?"

"No idea. I've never even been inside the house. Why does she keep her photos in an album and not, like, on a computer? Isn't she your age, probably?"

"Yes, I'm an elderly, 1980's child," Clara sighed, as though she couldn't believe that somebody born in the 1980s could be considered elderly. Especially not when eternal youth was on her side. "It's just nice sometimes. We've got photo albums and pictures in frames, the Doctor and I. Wedding photos, mainly. And – see – looks like Mrs Ward and I have something else in common." She showed Mattie a photo which was very clearly taken at a wedding, many years ago. "2011, it's dated."

"So like, the olden days. Even before _I_ was born."

"Enough of the olden days. 2011 is not… urgh. Kids today. When were you born, again?"

"August 5th. 2014. I'm fifty next month."

"So you're an ancient relic, too."

"Barely. Why do you care about the photos?"

"It's just nice to learn about people. There's baby photos in here, too. There's so many photos of you from when you were a baby."

"There's photos of me from throughout my whole life."

"I like babies, though. Less keen on teenagers."

"Thanks."

"She had a _lot_ … I wonder where they all are now…" Clara skimmed through the remaining reams of photos of Mrs Ward's family, as she, at first a youth, grew older and much more recognisable to Matilda. Strange how none of the anguish and bitterness that had characterised their interactions didn't seem present in these photographs. But nor were any of the relatives, and there were a good few decades missing from where the photographs ended up until the present day. At least three, she suspected. A lot could happen in thirty years. In fact, a lot could happen in thirty _minutes_. In the middle of the night, there had been a thirty-minute interlude between her parents both being alive and her parents both being dead.

"What's that one?" Matilda pointed over Clara's shoulder. It looked like a family Christmas, all the inhabitants of the previous images gathered around a table with Mrs Ward smiling and midway through carving a turkey. It was faded and creased, as was the plastic covering of the album, nearly falling away. It had been looked at many times. Clara slid it out and turned it over, where it was covered in names and dates. She sighed.

"They're dead. Her family. Her husband's name was Nicholas, he died six years ago. In fact, most of them…" Mattie had spotted it too: the death dates were the same for nearly all of them.

"They all died at once?"

"I guess," Clara said, "Probably an accident. March 16th, 2058."

"That's awful…"

"Yeah… yeah, it is…" She slid it back into place in the album.

Clara left the photos and proceeded into the kitchen, Mattie on her heels, to see what the Doctor was up to. She was examining the contents of the rusty kitchen sink with one hand covering her mouth and nose, peering at it from as far a distance as possible. The smell of the house got even worse as they entered.

"I think the cat's been peeing in the sink," she whispered. Clara almost retched.

"That's disgusting."

"This right here is a _severe_ depression. Gal's got _issues_."

"When did you last see her, Mattie?" Clara asked.

"Not for months. Church hasn't been around and it's not like I visit. She's very hostile." There were even more radios throughout the kitchen, however. It was as though she literally collected radios, but when Matilda looked at them a bit closer – though she didn't quite dare to pick one up – she saw they were all set to the same band. "Hey," she said, interrupting Clara and the Doctor freaking out about the maggoty contents of a very old cat food dish near the back door. Clara was glad for any excuse to get away from _that_ mess.

"What?"

"The radios are all set to the same frequency – do you think that's weird?" Clara frowned, then went back into the living room to check the devices in there, too. They weren't even all battery powered; the wall sockets were overloaded with adapters and plugs for them all, and the TVs.

"I wouldn't advise turning them on," the Doctor said from the kitchen doorway.

"Why not?" Mattie asked.

"I'm just sceptical of what, exactly, they're tuned into. Satellites are a lot more complex than radios…" Thirteen looked off into the middle-distance. Mattie leant down and peered closely at the dusty radios again; they didn't look like they'd been adjusted in a long time, all the dials set permanently to the one frequency.

"Who even uses analogue radios anymore? Are these not satellite radios?" she asked. She realised her glasses had gathered even more dust since they'd entered Mrs Ward's house and took them off to wipe them clean on her clothes for the second time.

"These things? They're ancient, older than Clara," said the Doctor.

"Sounds like your VCR player," Clara quipped.

"Hey! I like videos. I like having to rewind them," she argued. "You'd sure have to go to some trouble to get radios like this, though. And to have so many, not broken?"

"You're just going to make them dirtier," Clara said. It took Mattie a second to realise she was talking to her about her glasses.

"No, it's fine," she said, even though it wasn't and she was making them worse. The dust was irritating her nose, and she was snotty enough already since she had to keep sniffing back tears. "What do you mean about what the radios are tuned into?"

"It's complicated," said the Doctor, "I was once in 1953, with Rose, and there was an alien entity called the Wire living in the television sets and sucking off people's faces through the screens."

"Is that what's happening now?"

"No, I doubt it…" she said, then she turned and wandered back into the kitchen again. Clara watched her go, then rolled her eyes.

"Just leave her," Clara said, catching Mattie's eye after she had slid her glasses back on, bringing the world into focus again, "She gets lost her in her own mind sometimes."

"What does she mean, though? Things can travel through TVs? Through radios?" Mattie whispered.

"Maybe."

"But what _kind_ of things?" And Clara didn't answer her. Did Clara just not know, or was she trying to protect her?

"I'm gonna look upstairs."

" _What_?" Mattie hissed, "Don't do that! She might be up there, like, sleeping, or something."

"You can stay with the Doctor, or go back out to the car. Nobody's going to make you stay here if you don't want," said Clara, being much too accommodating for her grief. In that moment, and though her exact mood seemed to change between minutes, she didn't want anybody to be accommodating for her. She wanted to go up those stairs, because it would prove… she didn't rightly know what it would prove, but she suddenly decided that she was absolutely going to do it. So she followed Clara. "Look… I won't stop you, but be careful. Stay right behind me. Alright?"

"Alright," Mattie agreed. Clara didn't look convinced by her state of mind. She wasn't too convinced of her own state of mind.

The stairs were narrow and nearly black at the top, Clara turning her torch on them. Covered in hair from top to bottom, the foul smell of the house just got more potent the further they inched upwards. It was a very bad smell, but not the smell of cat poo. Much, much worse.

"Sweetheart…" Clara began, holding the back of her hand underneath her nose, "I'm not sure Mrs Ward is sleeping if she is up here."

"You don't have to sugar-coat it," Mattie lied. She very much did like Clara sugar-coating it. Silence in the dusty house and a beloved cat that hadn't been fed for days, or even weeks? It was what they had all been thinking. And still, despite pondering the thought ever since they'd pulled into the drive, nothing prepared Matilda for what they found in Mrs Ward's spare room.

Clara nudged the slightly-open door with her foot, and it creaked unbearably as it opened. The room was full of televisions and radios, like downstairs, only these ones weren't stacked aimlessly. They were in neat stacks, TVs on top of TVs, the bulky tube kinds and a very vintage set she suspected must be at least a century old. The paper-thin glass screens people used today were right on top with radios piled up similarly. They were all arranged around the walls, in a semi-circle, facing Mrs Ward. she sat, utterly motionless, in an old wooden chair right in the centre, back to the doorway.

"Stay there," Clara ordered Mattie, stepping tentatively into the room. As predicted, Mrs Ward didn't move. That was when Mattie spotted the blood on her head and neck, dry, crusty, and coming from her ears. Clara pressed her hand right over her mouth after shining the torch on Mrs Ward's face and shook her head.

"What?" asked Mattie, stepping closer.

"Matts – no – don't-" Clara held up a hand as if to stop her with her kinesis, but if that was her initial plan she did not follow through. Mattie nearly fell over into the wall of televisions when she saw what Clara had seen: the grotesquely terrified face of the ancient Mrs Ward, her eye sockets completely empty and black with old blood. But there were no eyes, dead or otherwise, to stare back. "Go back over there," Clara ordered her sharply, and she actually listened without resentment this time, wishing she had done so before. "Doctor!?" she shouted, "You'd better come up here!" There was a noise downstairs like Thirteen had knocked something over, then obedient footsteps. Clara stooped down to look at Mrs Ward very closely, shining the torch right in the gruesome eye sockets.

Thirteen nearly walked into Matilda as she came into the room.

"What is… _whoa_ …" the Doctor looked at the TVs, then went to Clara's side and also took in the characteristics of Mrs Ward's corpse. It stank in there. She took out the sonic screwdriver and examined Mrs Ward with it. "Her brain is basically, uh… mush. Severe haemorrhaging is what killed her and made her bleed like this. I guess it's true what they say about TV rotting your mind."

"And made Church bleed like that," Mattie pointed out.

"And me," said Clara, "From the phone interference… hold on…"

"What?" Thirteen asked. Clara appeared to be thinking very quickly though, realising something the Doctor must have missed.

"In 1897, a meteor crashed in Hollowmire and all the people there started to suffer the symptoms of an unusual plague," Clara began, "Brain blisters and severe haemorrhaging. And all those people were isolated in a sanatorium in the middle of a lake."

"Wait… but that's-"

"That's when Oc'thubha came to Earth," Clara said, "In said meteor."

"What's that?" Mattie interrupted.

"Oc'thubha is a sort of… extra-dimensional god," Clara explained, "Who came here from another universe after being banished by all the other gods in his pantheon, or whatever."

"Banished why…?"

"For being a totally chill dude, that's why," said the Doctor, "I love that guy. We hang out on myspace."

" _Myspace_?" Mattie asked in disbelief.

"Yeah, anyway," Clara resumed, "My point is that Oc'thubha made the people sick by mistake while trying to communicate telepathically with them through the telegram and phone lines. And later through TVs, radios and satellites. Sally's told me tons about this over the years, when she compiles her records. Rose can't affect Oc'thubha or see anything to do with him, or any of the other monsters from his dimension. She only has sovereignty over _our_ universe."

"Mrs Ward must have been communicating with another of them," Thirteen explained, "So now the question isn't 'what', but 'why'?" Clara said nothing more, instead went past Mattie to head into the next room: the bedroom. Matilda, not wanting to stay around the eerie corpse for longer than necessary – despite her reputation for morbidity – followed suit.

The bedroom was a lot less spooky than the rest of the house, though. Still covered in the same fine coating of cat hair, it very much looked like the sort of room an elderly lady would keep; the bed was even made. Clara made straight for the writing desk in the corner, covered in papers, pilfering it for everything it was worth. Matilda's attention, however, was piqued by the pictures on the walls. More family photos of Mrs Ward's relatives, her children who never seemed to visit and a husband who couldn't be alive any longer; but the most interesting by far were a set of photos arranged in a strange collage, portraying an old building. She lifted the frame off the wall, recognising much of the area.

Mostly because one of the buildings depicted was her own home.

"H-hey," she said shakily, "Clara…" Clara looked up.

"What's wrong?" Matilda didn't answer. "Mattie?" Clara came over and looked at the pictures as well, the Doctor still in the room with the body, "Wait, this is impossible." Mattie frowned.

"Impossible? It's creepy, but it's not-"

"No, this house was demolished over two-hundred-and-fifty years ago, in 1820."

" _No_ , that's _my house_."

She realised they were looking at different photographs in the collection. Clara was drawn to the picture of a large, stately home, while Mattie was encapsulated by the picture of the renovated cottage her parents had bought around four years ago.

"Wait… no, but – _your house_? Is _that cottage_? Shit! How did I… _oh my god_."

"What?"

"I've been there so many times since you moved, but I never… okay. This building," she pointed out the mansion, "Is Knighton Gorges Manor, right?"

"Yeah, centuries ago. We just live in what used to be the groundskeeper's cottage, or something like that."

"Matilda, Knighton Gorges Manor and the ground it used to stand on is one of the most haunted places in the country. And some might say the entire world. Certainly on the Isle of Wight which – quite frankly – is full of ghosts. But this photograph – it's taken with a modern camera. There are no photos of the mansion, just drawings, but you can recognise it by these weird gateposts, which-"

"Are still there, I know, I've seen them in the woods," Matilda said, "They're overgrown by the trees now, though, like most of the land."

"Matts, she took a photo of a house that doesn't exist. And now she's been killed trying to communicate with creatures from another dimension."

"I get that, I just – I don't know what you want me to say!" she protested.

"…Nothing, I'm just…" The Doctor heard their voices get louder and joined them in the bedroom now.

"What was that about a house that doesn't exist?"

"Photograph of Knighton Gorges," Clara explained, showing her the collection, "Which is famous in ghost stories for the fact that people claim to have seen apparitions of the entire building. Which-"

"Would happen if it existed in a liminal space," said Thirteen.

"Liminal?" Mattie asked.

"A place of transition," Clara said, "It comes from the Latin, 'limin', which means 'threshold.' If it exists on a liminal plane between dimensions, then-"

"Then this whole area could be used to transport things between two separate universes, with the old mansion right at the centre," the Doctor finished her sentence, "Things like Jack and Rose. Or worse… what else do you remember Sally telling you about Oc'thubha?" Clara opened her mouth to talk, but then the Doctor continued speaking, "You know what – hold it. Tell us in the car. We'd better go."

"Go? Go where?" Mattie asked.

"To see the ghost house," Thirteen said as she turned on her heel to leave.

"What? And just leave Mrs Ward here?"

"What do you propose we do? Call the authorities, her family, next of kin? The phones aren't working."

"And her family are dead," Clara reminded Matilda. She supposed they must be right, but she didn't like it. She felt like they had to tell somebody; someone ought to know. Surely there was someone who cared about what had happened to Mrs Ward? Not all of her acquaintances could be dead? But Matilda didn't even know her first name. How would any of them begin to make arrangements for a funeral? At least her parents had left instructions… not instructions that she was too privy to, that was Jack's job, and…

Now she was thinking about that again, and how much they needed Jack. Just like Rose, he'd always been there, trusted with everything…

"Do you maybe want to leave the cat here?" Clara asked her before they got back into her parents' car. She had her hand on the door and didn't know what to say.

"You mean just dump him?"

"No, not…"

"He should at least be buried," she said. Clara exchanged a look with the Doctor, a very fleeting one Mattie couldn't decipher.

"Of course," said Clara, "We'll do it later. Once we get Jack and Rose."

"Do you really think we will?"

"Absolutely," said the Doctor as they all got into the car, "When you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything."

"Even saving them from evil gods from another dimension?"

"You can't give up, Matts," Clara told her, starting the car, "Can't lose hope. Do you think Jack and Rose would lose hope if it was you who'd been taken?" Mattie leant back in the passenger seat, the Doctor behind her. _No_ , they wouldn't lose hope. They wouldn't ever give up trying to get her back. Clara passed her phone to the Doctor in the back. "Try and call Donna, see if you get through."

"Why Donna?" Matilda asked.

"Donna can make portals between dimensions at will," Clara explained.

"She can!?"

"Yeah."

"I thought she could just shout really loud."

"She can. And she can make portals. Including portals into the world of these god things… basically, a very long time ago before you were born, there was an incident in Hollowmire, right? Where another of these gods, called Ic'tharru, tried to destroy the Earth as revenge for Oc'thubha getting so friendly with humans. They had to go into the dark universe and destroy this power source that was keeping it connected to Earth."

"Destroy it how?"

"Esther did it."

"Can't get Donna," said the Doctor, "Same thing."

"Well – Esther, try her. She can travel through phone lines," Clara said, clearly stabbing in the dark. If they needed Esther's help and they couldn't get a hold of her… "If we could just get internet connection for half a second we could tweet her." Or tweet the Lightning Girl, as she was known to the rest of the world for the last decade. The closest thing to an actual superhero the planet actually had – well, aside from the Doctor, perhaps. But the Doctor couldn't shoot electricity out of her hands. Neither could Clara. It wouldn't bode well for them if they had to destroy another extra-dimensional power source, seeing as none of them were living lightning rods.

"Listen, Mattie, the important thing to remember is Newton's third law, okay?" said Thirteen, leaning over the back of the seat, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

"Meaning what?"

"If you can open a door, you can also close the door."

"Nice," Clara muttered, "Very deep. Very good understanding of the basic principles of doors."

"What goes around comes around."

"She means we can stop them coming through," Clara 'translated' to Mattie, the Doctor putting the phone to her ear again, "Sparky's probably busy, anyway. Rescuing children from a burning orphanage, talking someone off a ledge or getting a cat out of a tree."

"What do you mean, 'them'?"

"There's this poem," Clara said, "By Lovecraft-"

"Clara's specialty," the Doctor interrupted for a moment.

"Yes, thanks. A poem. Called 'Night-Gaunts.' About creatures he used to have nightmares about. I'm not so great at remembering poems when I'm driving, but it goes something like, ' _Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell, / But every night I see the rubbery things, / Black, horned, and slender, with membranous wings, / They come in legions on the north wind's swell / With obscene clutch that titillates and stings, / Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings / To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare's well_.' It's one of his better poems. They're predominantly quite shit."

"So what's your point?"

"Okay, there's another story about Knighton Gorges and about the old gateposts where people sometimes claim to see large, black gargoyles appear on them. And they did all get attacked by one back when the portal opened in Hollowmire."

"How did they stop it?"

"Shot it, I think. So, you see, they're not invincible."

"But we don't have any guns. And Jack _did_ have a gun. And Rose can crush cars with her bare hands."

"The element of surprise was on their side," said the Doctor, "Jack wasn't there when they went after Ic'tharru, neither was Rose. Clara only knows so much about it because she's got a vested interest in anything spooky."

"Mm, well, it comes in very useful being married to you," Clara said quietly, turning off the road and back into the drive leading to Mattie's house.

She had lived in that building for four years without ever feeling too much unease, inside or out, but now it filled her with an unbridled sense of dread. Not just because of the familial emptiness it symbolised for her now, but because of the horrors surrounding it. Horned, winged monsters kidnapping her godparents and throwing cat corpses at the windows, and the dead body of a lonely old woman with her brains turned to pulp – it was overwhelming. Even the trees looked frightening to her now.

Clara stopped the car. Cold wind bit her face once she got out to follow them both; the Doctor had not managed to get through to Esther.

"You should get a signal for her. A lightning signal," she suggested.

"I wish," said the Doctor, "Tagging her on social media is much more effective. If you can connect to social media, that is. It's like in _Kick-Ass_."

"Which way are the gateposts?" Clara asked Matilda.

"Sort of, that way," she pointed towards the back of the house, "Where you said the cat came from…" Where Jack and Rose went, and where they disappeared from. "Maybe they found the house?"

"Maybe," said Clara, "Can you see the land? From the upstairs windows?"

"Yeah, but I've never seen that building."

"I suppose not… come on. Stay close. I'm doing a forcefield thing. Kinetically. So don't worry."

"The Phantom is _almost_ as good as the Lightning Girl," said the Doctor. Mattie heeded Clara's words and stayed right by her side, looking around every few seconds to check she didn't see any devilish monsters crawling out of the shadows.

"So, the story here," Clara began, keeping them occupied as they trekked. It wasn't a far walk, though. "Is that allegedly, a few hundred years ago, the house was owned by Hugh de Morville."

"The Lord of Westmorland," the Doctor added, "One of the knights responsible for assassinating Thomas Becket in 1170, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after a bit of an extreme misunderstanding. Because the king – Henry II – didn't actually want them to kill Becket, it was just like, an offhand comment, so then these assassins were excommunicated and fled."

"De Morville believed it was cursed," Clara returned to the folklore, "Lots of the owners of the house have had run-ins with bad luck. Most famously Sir Tristram Dillington, whose children all died of smallpox and then he killed himself in 1718. And then, in 1821, another owner demolished the house out of spite just because he didn't want his daughter marrying this clergyman. Or so the stories go. They say the house reappears often on New Year's Eve, and that sometimes the gargoyles rematerialise. The weird part is that nobody even knows if those gargoyles ever actually existed in the first place."

"And you just know this? You just memorise ghost stories?"

"It's _useful_ ," Clara reiterated, "Especially in our line of work."

"Teaching?"

"Just general adventuring," the Doctor said, "She's got a master's degree in occult studies." Mattie had never been told that, she just thought Clara Oswald read a lot of books. She didn't know she was some sort of folklore aficionado, that was more the idea she associated with the Gutkeleds. Not that she was ever allowed to see either of them, her parents had always absolutely refused to invite them in – especially Sally Sparrow, even if Esther and Jenny did both put in good words for them.

The stone gateposts loomed through the unnatural flog curdling around the tree trunks and their legs, like wading through a ghostly swamp. She'd seen them before a few times, though she couldn't say she wandered into the woods particularly often, but had never felt so ill at ease. Seven-foot-tall, imposing stone columns, a rotten wooden gate between them. And behind it the large, overgrown field where the manor had once stood. It certainly wasn't there now, though. Neither were these gargoyles. The gate was rusted shut, so Clara boosted her over it first while the Doctor scaled it awkwardly on her own. Clara merely phased through, which amazed Matilda, who had so rarely seen Clara turn intangible; she'd only really heard about it from anecdotes her parents tried to keep from her so she didn't get enamoured with the lifestyle of an intergalactic time-traveller. This brief exploit had done more than enough to dissuade her from that life so far, however, much more than her parents actively keeping her away from it. She didn't want any of what had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and only grew more and more frightened with every passing minute.

"Huh," said Clara, crossing her arms, "I wonder what we do now…"

"There has to be something here," said Matilda.

"Don't worry," Thirteen announced, taking out her screwdriver, "I know just what to do."

She did not, in fact, know just what to do. Her idea of knowing 'just what to do' entailed walking around using the tiny sonic device like a makeshift metal detector, dragging it up and down the length of the field and the wet grass while Clara and Matilda observed, thoroughly unconvinced.

"We could try shouting?" Clara suggested.

"Won't that draw these things out?"

"I don't really know… hey, while we're stumped, are you okay? Probably a really stupid question, I know, but… well, I can't just not check on you."

"I don't know," she answered honestly. Clara watched her carefully.

"Yeah. My mum died when I was sixteen." Matilda hadn't known that. "And my dad when I was fifty-three, back at the tail-end of 2042. He had cancer. Mum was… sudden… I know what it's like, is my point. Like, _really_ , I do, it's the hardest thing in the world. That's why I started smoking."

"You think I should start smoking?"

"Absolutely not, not in a million years. It's an appalling habit. I've never managed to kick it."

"…Why doesn't Other You smoke? I mean, I've never seen her smoke."

"I think it's because the tobacco craving dulls in comparison to the human blood craving. Look, I'm not going to say that if you ever want to talk to someone you can talk to me – even though obviously you can, if you do – but if you ever just want somebody _around_ , who does understand, then I'm good for that. So's the Doctor, though she'll talk your ear off if you give her half a chance," she smiled fondly when she said that, glancing at the Doctor patrolling up and down the field with her screwdriver, "I know we're not your godparents and we haven't been here for you as much as Jack and Rose, but we do care. We'll do our best." Matilda believed her. There was something sincere about Clara, something trustworthy; a warmth.

"Thanks. I wouldn't know what to say even if I did want to talk."

"I don't think anybody ever really knows what to say in situations like this," Clara told her, "Hard enough even understanding what you're feeling, let alone trying to put that into words and confide in somebody else."

"Hey!" the Doctor shouted from the dead-centre of the field, right where the house had been stood in the old picture, "Get over here! There's something underground, I'm pretty sure."

"Probably just a rabbit warren or a badger den," Clara said quietly enough that only Matilda heard, following her wife's directions. Matilda followed, too, as the Doctor scanned the mud in a circle around her feet.

"There's stuff down here," Thirteen said.

"Stuff?"

"Yeah. _Stuff_. Hinky stuff. Weird energy. I think it's hollow."

"If it's _hollow_ …" Clara began, thinking. "You two should stand back." Matilda didn't know why they should stand back, but going by how quickly the Doctor vacated the area and moved a few metres away from the spot, she was easily convinced that she should do the same thing. As soon as she was at a safe distance, Clara held out both of her hands towards the ground and it _exploded_.

'Exploded' wasn't necessarily the best description, it was more like a hole had been punched in the ground from above by an incredibly large hand, causing bits of grass and mud to go flying in all directions. A gaping hole was left between them, as though she had just dug a well through willpower alone, and Clara stepped forwards to look inside. The Doctor also tentatively craned her neck to try and see without approaching.

"Anything, Coo?"

"Oh, yeah. There's something. It's too dark to see much." It didn't seem like Clara thought it risky at all to simply jump into the wound she'd created, disappearing into the ground without a care in the world. Matilda stared at the Doctor in shock, and Thirteen began to step closer. "No monsters!" Clara shouted up, her voice echoing, "No godparents, either. If you both follow, I'll cushion the landing."

"You go first," the Doctor said to Matilda, "Don't want you left up here on your own."

"I don't really… uh…" She was caught between a rock and a hard place. Stay in the field with the ghost mansion all on her own, or follow her new guardians into the very creepy underground cave. Fearing loneliness above all else, she chose the latter option, and like Clara descended into the underneath.

The cave had crumbling, grey stone walls and stank of wet mud, dirt, and something strange she hadn't a hope of identifying. It was also full of objects: test tubes, flasks, books, an odd slab in the middle which looked like a cross between an altar and a gurney with unusual shapes carved into its surface. The floor also was covered in the small bones and bodies of various woodland creatures, everything from mice to a skull she thought belonged to a fox. Mildew-covered papers were stacked on every surface as well as jars containing coloured liquids and specimens. The dark mouth of a tunnel formed at one side.

"I suppose that's the normal entrance," Clara said, looking at the passage, "Must come out in the woods somewhere. We've taken the express route." The Doctor finally jumped down behind Matilda, crunching the fox skull underfoot by mistake.

"Eurgh!" she exclaimed, "These are my nice shoes!"

"You say that about all your shoes," Clara said.

"That's because all my shoes are nice. Gross…"

"Where _are_ we…?" Matilda asked, crossing her arms tightly around herself and avoiding touching anything.

"My best guess? A laboratory," said the Doctor after only a moment of taking in their surroundings. "Definitely has that kind of vibe."

"Conducting what kind of experiments?"

"Spooky ones," said Clara, "Opening portals into other dimensions."

"But surely you can't just _do_ that," said Matilda as the Doctor went to rifle through the mouldy papers on the table in front of her, "Wouldn't you need some really powerful technology to travel to a different dimension?"

"Depends," said Thirteen, "There's certain areas where it's easier than others. Sometimes you can just walk from one universe to another. And going between universes is generally safer than travelling between two points in the same one. You'd be lucky to survive going through a rift in time-space over here, and you need a very strong ship to withstand a wormhole."

"I told you," Clara continued, "It's liminal. A place of transience between one realm and another. Like when Alice goes down the rabbit hole and gets to Wonderland, or when Bottom gets lost in the forest and meets Titania. Alice thinks it was a dream, Bottom thinks it was a dream. The entities that come from where Oc'thubha comes from-"

"Acnictexr," interrupted Thirteen. Clara paused and looked at her, but the Doctor was reading aloud from a piece of paper she'd found.

"Sorry?"

"That's where they're from, the city, it says here in these notes, Acnictexr."

"What were you saying about them? The entities?" Matilda pressed Clara when she lost her train of thought, watching the Doctor rifle through the paraphernalia for more information.

"Oh. They can communicate through dreams."

"'Communicate' is a generous word…" Thirteen muttered.

"Alright, they can make people have visions. Nightmares. It happened to Donna."

"You said H.P. Lovecraft had nightmares about those gargoyle-things…" Mattie remembered.

"Yeah. He did."

"As did Mrs Ward," said the Doctor, "She says, ' _six years ago I started having the dreams_.' Visions of the city. Black sun, black sky, gothic buildings, grey ground, innumerable horrors… ' _but over time I began to understand_ ,' she goes, ' _I began to realise that they were the true creators of mankind, the true guardians, and that mankind has gone astray. I have been chosen, with no more attachments, to enable their return to a world no longer deserving of human habitation. Life will be reborn anew and I will be among those to see it._ ' She writes a lot of stuff like that. Most of these were written in the last few months, though, I'd say. Based on the state of the paper."

"Six years ago?" Clara implored.

"Yeah."

" _Six_?"

"Yeah, six. Why?"

"That's when the accident happened and her family died," said Clara, "And she said she has 'no more attachments'?"

"What's your theory?"

"The house here was supposed to be cursed, people died tragically, Dillington committed suicide… maybe it – or these things – _need_ that. Maybe they're drawn here now, today, because of the fresh grief." _Because my parents have died_ , Mattie thought but did not say. "Wouldn't someone be more susceptible to their influence after a tragedy? This land has been collecting sorrow for years, it's full of it."

"So Mrs Ward is, like, their agent, then?" Matilda interrupted them brainstorming with each other. She didn't want them to forget she was there, or something.

"Exactly," said Clara, "They're using her and her grief-"

"-to create a real, permanent gateway between the worlds. It's like capillaries, you know?" the Doctor said to her, "Semi-permeable. Some things – like these night-gaunts or Donna Noble – can get through. But the big boys, like Ic'tharru and your friendly, neighbourhood Time Lord, can't. Not without using a serious amount of energy to make an actual portal manifest – you'll notice the distinct absence of a portal."

"Maybe it's an invisible portal?" Mattie suggested.

"No, trust me, if there was a portal open to another dimension we'd definitely see it. I mean, you know the beginning of _Hellboy_?"

"No."

"Well, it's just like that. Only I'm Rasputin. I mean, obviously I'm not Rasputin, he was a nasty piece of work, but in _Hellboy_ I'm playing the role of Rasputin. And you two are like the Nazis helping him. But in a good way."

"Do you ever think you ought to stop talking?" Clara said to her.

"Yeah, but my mouth just runs away with itself… anyway," she went back to her notes, "We've established the portal isn't open yet. So now the question is _how_ do we open it?"

"How do we _what_!?" Mattie exclaimed.

"Open the portal."

"Why!?"

"Why did the chicken cross the road?" the Doctor countered.

"What!?"

"To get to the other side," Clara told her, "To rescue Jack and Rose."

"Normally I'd be one-hundred-percent against opening a portal to a dimension full of monsters that want to destroy our entire universe," the Doctor went on, "But in this case, I really don't think they should be getting their spooky hands on the Bad Wolf and the Man Who Can't Die. Just thinking about what could happen is giving me majorly bad juju."

"Is that how juju works?" Clara asked, perusing more paper.

"What are you, the juju police? Anyway – come on."

"Come on?" Clara repeated, confused.

"You're the occultist," Thirteen reminded her, "Why don't you use your back catalogue of Lovecraftiana and tell us how to cross dimensions?"

"I'm not a magician," Clara snapped, shaking her head, "I don't know, it probably wants something ridiculous, like a blood sacrifice. ' _Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches' mummy, maw and gulf_ –'"

The Doctor interjected to continue, " _Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron_ -"

That was when something dropped down onto Mattie's shoulder. Whatever it was it terrified her and made her jump backwards, her initial assumption being that it was a spider. It was, she realised when she knocked it to the floor, just a clump of grass and dirt. However, the problems really arose when she tripped over her own feet, fell into the wall, and knocked into something.

"Are you okay?" Clara asked immediately, worrying.

"I'm fine," Matilda said, "I'm just… _whoa_ …" She had pushed something, which now looked like a button, into the wall. Shrouded by dirt and impossible to see otherwise, but parts of the surrounding earth were now vibrating, moving, changing, forming mysterious shapes all embedded into the ground. The movement spread the length of the whole lair, Mattie carefully returning to Clara's side. The cave itself was spinning around them.

"Uh-oh," said the Doctor.

"What?" Clara asked urgently, "What is it?"

"Kinetic generator… We should get as close as possible, think like – vortex manipulator teleportation close, c'mon," she dashed around the table and grabbed both their arms.

"Kinetic generator powering _what_?"

"The portal."

"You said they might not have been able to make a portal or whatever 'big boy' is out there would have come through by now!" Clara argued.

"Well maybe there's something else going on, because seriously, you've really gotta brace yourselves for what's gonna feel like someone's just sucked all the air out of your lungs with a pair of bellows. Just get ready."

"For what!?"

"Something wicked this way comes!"


	10. Nowhere Girl - Chapter 4

_Nowhere Girl_

 _4_

Mattie had only ever been teleported by Rose Tyler before. And one other time, supposedly, when she had been kidnapped by Daleks, but it wasn't an event she remembered an awful lot about. Suffice it to say, being sucked with very little warning through an inter-dimensional portal was significantly more uncomfortable. It felt a bit like her entire body had been stretched and pulled through a tiny cable, and then spat out somewhere eerily inhospitable, and for all she knew that had been _exactly_ what had happened. Less than twelve hours had passed since her care had switched from her parents to their friends, and already she'd seen a gruesome corpse and travelled to a completely different universe. She was counting down the seconds until her brain exploded.

The musty cave transformed itself around them into a dreary cellar, which stank of something awful she couldn't pinpoint. It made her want to vomit – or perhaps that was the teleport. Or maybe the grief, or the worry, or-

"Matts, sweetheart?" she heard Clara ask her, "Are you-" Matilda _did_ vomit, right into a corner. Very little came up since she hadn't really eaten anything since early the previous day, but the retching was visceral and painful. She was dumbly aware of Clara holding her hair back a second later. "Yeah, I know," Clara said quietly, "That was a rough one." Mattie leant against the cold, unpleasant wall, trembling slightly. She suddenly felt tears coming up again.

"Yeah," said the Doctor uneasily, "It's, um… it's not swell here. Sometimes you can't even tell you're in a different universe, but others…? Well."

"It's gonna be alright," Clara cooed to Matilda, rubbing her back. Was that why the Doctor called her 'Coo'? Mattie didn't even know if she believed her. She desperately wanted to go to bed and slip into a dreamless sleep where she could forget about all the tragedies that had befallen her in the last twenty-four hours. Why couldn't she have stayed at home? It wasn't like she offered anything _useful_ , she didn't have any expertise.

She heaved again and heard Clara sigh pitifully.

"Get me your handkerchief," Clara bade the Doctor, who came over, fumbling in the pockets of her jacket. She drew out a hanky, which Clara scoffed slightly at the sight of, "You're such an old man sometimes."

"I was an old man for quite a long time, I may remind you. It's clean, Matts, don't worry. Just… hang onto it for now, yeah?" It was a bizarre handkerchief, embroidered with odd, circular symbols.

"What's the pattern?" she asked quietly, looking at it.

"It's Gallifreyan."

"What's it say?"

"Gesundheit." Matilda sniffed and then wiped the corners of her mouth. "Well, not literally 'gesundheit,' but the same sentiment. Doesn't really translate to English. Or German, relatively speaking. Any Earth-language, in fact."

"This is your first language?" she squinted at all the circles.

"Yeah-huh," said the Doctor, smiling a little, the three of them clustered together in the corner, "I'll teach you it someday, if you want. I'd have loved to teach it to Jenny, but she's got a natural affinity for languages. Doesn't need my help."

"You could teach it to me," Clara said.

"But I don't like you," the Doctor told her curtly. Matilda could have laughed, on any other day. Finally, she began to feel slightly better, less like she was going to throw up. "For your first time crossing into another universe without warning, I'd say you're holding up okay. Considering _I_ can't even remember where I live right now."

"We live in Brighton," Clara told her. The Doctor nodded slowly, trying to comprehend this. Had she really forgotten something like that? Where she _lived_? Then she clicked her fingers and smiled.

"Brighton. Seaside. Gays. Gotcha. Now, then… this is, uh…" The Doctor stepped away from them into the centre of the room, "Ooh… interesting, interesting…" They were still underground as far as Matilda could tell, in a squalid little cellar full of dirt and books. More strange instruments, and a large circle of metal shapes in the centre of the room. "This is the generator!" Thirteen exclaimed, "Couldn't really see it from where we were because it's buried, but now, it's all out in the open…" It reminded Mattie of a gyroscope because of the strange way the pieces moved. They also looked to be suspended in mid-air, and were still moving, in fact, floating around slowly. Thirteen stooped to look at the large pieces closely. In the centre, all the solid objects were gone, and in their place was an odd, glowing shape – half gaseous, half liquid, hovering – of the strangest colour Matilda had ever seen, so bizarre that she could hardly even comprehend or describe it.

"Did you say it's a kinetic generator?" Clara pressed her.

"Mattie nudging it was all it needed to take us here," she said.

"How does it float like that?" Mattie asked.

The Doctor grinned, "Beats me! I'd guess there's some incongruity between the laws of physics here and the laws of physics the three of us are used to. I doubt they'd be fully _reversed_ , that'd be chaos, _but_ …" She paced around the outside of the 'generator.' "I think if we can get this machine to _stop_ moving, the portal here will close and take us back with it. So long as we're inside. But starting again from _this_ side, would, uh… well. Let's not think about that."

"You mean, we might get _trapped_?"

"Yeah. This must be what they needed Mrs Ward for," the Doctor theorised, "If they can come through but only when somebody opens the portal from the _other side_ … and Mrs Ward is the most susceptible, grief-stricken widow out there, well. We know from Oc'thubha that they can psychically influence people from their other dimension. Which we should probably name…"

"I've got the best name," Clara said.

"What's that?"

"We'll call it, 'the Unnameable.'"

"That is _so_ Lovecraftian, I hate it. And I hate you. 'The Unnameable' it is."

"How can you name something 'Unnameable'?" Mattie questioned.

"It's a joke," said Clara.

" _A joke_ ," she repeated, muttering. But then she thought of something else. "You said loads of people have, like, died tragically here, right?"

"Yeah," Clara nodded.

"So… were they _other_ 'agents'? Of these things?"

"Maybe…" the Doctor said, thinking, "If they were, that brings up a lot of interesting questions. Namely, what is it they want? If they can already influence people to open that portal so they can come through whenever they need to, then what is it they're actually after? If they've had access for so long, why is it only _now_ that they've decided they want to 'take over the world', or whatever?" Nobody had an answer for the question she posed. Mattie hadn't a clue, unless the monsters in this 'Unnameable' (which she still thought was a stupid name) had been waiting specifically for her parents to die. Or Mrs Ward to die.

"Could be an answer in one of these books?" Clara suggested, "It sort of looks like a library down here. A shadow library."

" _Shadow library_? Do you hear yourself?" the Doctor mocked her, but Clara was already sliding a book off a shelf next to Matilda. Thirteen continued to pace around the large, rotating pieces of the generator. How much would it take to make it stop, she wondered? And did they have any chance of getting home if it _did_? The book was a dusty, leather tome, which Clara held very awkwardly as she tried to open it. When she did, however, the result wasn't good; Mattie saw her face fall.

"Oh, that's not… hmm…"

"What is it?" Thirteen asked. Mattie didn't ask, instead going directly to stand by Clara's side. The book was written in a completely foreign language, one even stranger than the circular symbols of the Gallifreyan embroidered on the Doctor's old handkerchief. The characters were criss-crossing, spiralling scribbles made up of bizarre characters, words and sentences – if they could even be described as such – knotting together. Even if the patterns were to be 'untangled', as it were, they were still utterly illegible. The Doctor scoffed when she saw this, annoyed. "I hate how this always happens with things from this stupid dimension… can never read the language! Happened on Krop-Tor, happens in Hollowmire, and now it's happening here."

"What's Krop-Tor?" Mattie asked.

"A planet in orbit around a black hole."

"Is it possible to orbit a black hole? Doesn't that defeat the point of a black hole?"

"It does. It had the devil inside it."

"It… what?"

"Well. Turns out it wasn't the devil, it was Oc'thubha's cousin Vh'ozuth. Monster from before the universe, wrote in an incomprehensible language."

"Alright, well, maybe the books won't be totally useless…" Clara said, putting this large tome away and going to ransack the other shelves.

"What d'you mean, Coo?"

"Well – words aren't the only way to convey a story or information… Centuries ago, when everyone was illiterate, people used to learn scripture from pictures. You would have fully-illustrated Bibles. It's just an idea," she said, searching through books as quickly as she could, flicking through their illegible pages and then dropping them in a stack on the floor. "They obviously have some literary sense to compile a library in the first place."

They were desperate, it was plain to see that much. The Doctor had done her bit in working out how they had gotten there, and how to get back, and now Clara was trying to match her by making even further progress. It wasn't panning out for her, however. Matilda did not help search through the books. Instead, she very carefully began to explore the rest of the room, ignoring their fruitless efforts. She wasn't convinced about the logic of keeping books down in a cellar where they'd get mouldy, but also doubted that the creatures living there cared. It was chilly, even colder than it had been at home, on the Isle of Wight – or, were they technically still on the Isle of Wight…? She had no idea. Maybe it was an entire parallel Earth, populated by nightmarish beasts she could only imagine.

She didn't want to imagine them.

She had enough nightmares of her own without adding to them. Maybe she could leave, go wait on the other side and re-open the portal after a certain amount of time, hope that the Doctor and Clara – who were now arguing over whether something was an illustration or just even weirder writing – would be able to just wrap everything up without her. And she could go wait, on her own, out in the woods, which suddenly seemed safe and welcoming. She still had so much to take in, to attempt to understand… It wasn't like she was going to be of much use, anyway. What could she do to help rescue Jack and Rose? Even on a _good_ day, she couldn't…

Mattie spied something out of the corner of her eye. Partially hidden behind one of the shelves and wedged against the muddy wall, it appeared to be an enormous canvas. Forgetting everything she had just learnt from the mishap with the generator about not touching things, Mattie took it upon herself to go drag the thing out from its obscuration. It scraped along the dirty floor, scratching its base, and only once it was fully out and propped up – standing at just over six feet tall and another six feet wide – she was consumed by an incredibly feeling of dread. She nearly staggered into the generator again, potentially ceasing its slow rotations, but she was steadied by the Doctor. They must have heard what she was doing and left the books alone.

"Careful there," the Doctor said, "Don't want you knocking out our way home."

"Oh, sh…" Clara trailed off the swear she had been about to let slip, eyes fixed on the canvas. It was difficult to say if the image could really described as a 'painting.' Whatever the picture was painted with was thick, dark and coagulated, and appeared to be coloured in a way much different to typical paint. She was also not convinced by the material it was printed on, but it had been very hard when she'd moved the thing. It was Clara who approached and carefully ran her fingers across its surface, then she flinched. "It's vellum. Uh, sort of…"

"'Sort of'?" Mattie questioned.

"Well, 'vellum' derives from Latin," Clara explained, "From, uh…"

" _Vitulinum_ ," the Doctor supplied.

"Right. Which means 'made of calf.' When monks used to write all the books, the pages were made of vellum, not paper. Like, skin."

"But this is only 'sort of' skin?"

"No. It's only 'sort of' _calf_ skin. It, um… well… there's a belly-button… and up there I can see a, uh, nipple…"

"What!? It's – it's made of _people_? Of _humans_!?"

"I think it's painted with blood, too," said Clara. Mattie was seriously regretting touching it, that was _far_ worse than the dead cat. At least she _knew_ Church; whatever corpses this thing was made of were strangers. Or she hoped they were strangers… come to think of it, it would probably worse if she _did_ know their identities. "Half the stuff in the Gutkeled Archive looks like this – when Sally actually lets me _look_ at the Gutkeled Archive…"

"You mean the vampires? They write on skin?"

"Sally and Ravenwood don't," Clara continued, "But old vampire books are all written on skin. They're theatrical like that."

"Hey, Coo," the Doctor said quietly, her eyes widening as she took in the painting, "Could'ya scoot over that way, a little?" she motioned with her hand for Clara to stand aside, which Clara did. "Holy… that's Jack and Rose."

"It's – what?" Mattie had barely even taken in the actual _contents_ of the picture.

"Look – two people, hanging by their wrists from these ropes or chains or whatever," she animatedly approached the picture to point out everything she was talking about, "One of them's wearing a long, blue coat and the other's got this gold, yellowy aura. Suspended over ah, uh… oh." What they were 'suspended over' really defied description, but was an unidentifiable mass covered in hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of tiny fang-like teeth and eyeballs. It was a writhing, sickness-inducing lump of eyes and teeth. The Doctor produced her sonic screwdriver again and began examining the picture closely.

"They only went missing, like, two hours ago – how could this be here already? And painted?"

"Well," the Doctor began, semi-distracted by her scanning, "Like I said, there might be different laws of physics here. As in, the progression of time might be totally different. It could be faster, slower, backwards – totally disconnected and not even linear at _all_ – who's to say these 'agents' are being accessed from here in the same chronological pattern that we see the 'curse' take effect in reality? Determining the age of this thing should help us a lot, though…" They paused and waited until the Doctor drew back the sonic screwdriver, holding it aloft and looking at it like it was going to tell her something. She slumped. "Just what I was afraid of. This picture is at least five-hundred years old."

"Meaning what?" Mattie asked.

"Meaning we're in a prophecy-fulfilling situation," she stepped back and put her hands on her hips.

"What!? So they're going to die!?"

" _Die_? Where do you get that idea?"

"From the picture!"

"Are they dead in the picture?"

"They're about to be!"

"Exactly. _About to be_. This picture predicts Jack and Rose being here and suspended by chains over some Elder God hooligan, it doesn't predict anything more," Thirteen explained, "It's not a comic strip. Although, that _would_ be surreal, huh? Vellum comics. Kooky. But, on the bright side, at least we know what we're looking for now: a giant, underground pit with a monster inside it. And I doubt it's too far. Plus – this explain the whole mystery of why they threw a dead cat at your house; must have been to lure Jack and Rose somewhere isolated where they could snatch them."

"Mm… sweetheart," Clara stopped the Doctor when she made to walk off and investigate somewhere else, "Maybe you should go. You and Mattie."

"Maybe – _what_?"

"Back through the portal. I'll go after Jack and Rose."

" _Alone_?" The Doctor clearly wasn't happy about this, and as Clara lowered her voice the conversation became more and more private. Mattie felt decidedly like an intruder.

"It'll be safer for her if-"

"Coo, I'm not leaving you alone here," the Doctor whispered to her firmly, "Why would you even bring that up?"

"Because of… because you know why!" Clara hissed.

"I could go back on my own," Matilda interjected. She didn't want them to start fighting, especially not with her in the room.

"We're safer all three of us together," the Doctor continued to argue, "I can't even believe you would suggest – this place is a living nightmare!"

"I can handle it," Clara persisted, "At least stay here, let me go on alone. This room seems safe enough."

"Out of the question! We need each other! We can't work this stuff out with just one of us – I'm not the master, literary occultist and you're not the genius, alien scientist!"

"You know I'm right here," Matilda said loudly, "Don't talk about me like I'm not." They stopped, and Clara let go of the Doctor's arms.

"Matts," she began, trying to be tender and sympathetic, walking over to address her directly, "It's not good for you to be here. It's not good for _anyone_ to be here. It might be traumatic, especially after everything that's happened already. You're the most grief-stricken of all of us, so you're the most susceptible to any influence they might try and exert. It would be wrong of us not to give you a choice of if you want to stay or go."

Matilda was torn. What were her options? Let Clara venture off on her own? Leave and go back to Earth with nobody to watch over her? Stay, and face the monsters of 'the Unnameable'?

 _What would her parents do?_ Surely, they'd do whatever it took to help Jack and Rose. They'd do whatever it took to help _any_ of their friends and family. But she also knew that if the situation were different, if she were there with her parents and not with Clara and the Doctor, they wouldn't let her come with them. They would want her to be safe, but would she be safer away from that place altogether, or in the company of Clara and the Doctor, who were in the best position to understand what was going on?

"…If they really trusted you that much to write you in their Wills, then… I'm probably better off with you both looking out for me." Clara obviously did not think this was the right call, but Mattie wasn't sure there was a right call at all. Because of the ambiguity, she didn't argue. It was Mattie's choice to say, and who was to say she _wouldn't_ be able to cope with whatever they saw? With the eyeball-teeth monster? "And they're _my_ godparents. Maybe I'll be able to do _something_ to help them. Anything."

"Okay," Clara relented, "But you do exactly as we say, alright? And some things here, looking at them might… people have been known to be driven to madness. So if I tell you not to look at something, you close your eyes and look away, alright?" Mattie nodded. "You _promise_?"

"I'm not seven."

"Matilda."

"Yeah, I promise. I'll look away."

"And _you_ ," Clara turned to the Doctor, "Be careful. And if we run into any monsters, you let _me_ take the lead. Rose's powers might not work in other dimensions, but mine do." The Doctor said nothing, just crossed her arms and looked grumpy. Unlike with Mattie, Clara didn't make the Doctor promise anything. "Let's go find this monster pit, then. Before Jack and Rose get eaten." Clara seemed more irritated at the intrusion of these cross-dimensional creatures rather than actually worried about Jack and Rose. Was she just that confident in her abilities, or was she putting on a brave face? Maybe it was a little of both…

Nevertheless, they finally deigned to leave the decrepit, muddy cellar, heading upstairs into the ghostly ruins of Knighton Gorges Manor.

It certainly was a nightmare realm they had travelled to, and just being there was making Matilda sick to her stomach. Everything was unpleasantly wet to the touch, strange condensation and mould across every surface. It didn't get any less dank once they reached the ground floor, emerging from a small door in the side of a rather grand staircase into a twisted parody of a National Trust building. She wondered if there was an evil equivalent of a gift shop selling freakish, Cthulhoid figurines. An anomalous, dark fluid dripped from the cracks in the wallpaper and the wooden boards behind. Following Clara closely, she instinctively lowered her voice when she talked.

"So, like, who built this?"

"How do you mean?" Clara whispered back. All three of them were tiptoeing.

"Well, if it exists in both universes, obviously it was built by actual people back home, but who built it here?"

"Thinks slip through," said the Doctor, "Especially here, where cognition is important. It's an imprint in the memories of the people who live in this area of the Isle of Wight."

"So it exists because it exists?"

"Well… in a way. I guess because these creatures inhabit and utilise it so readily. Not _everywhere_ in this universe is a dark mirror of ours, just useful areas. The kinds they can exploit. People's awareness of it, historically, is probably what makes it rematerialise every so often – like in Mrs Ward's photographs. Like, _you've_ never seen it, but maybe that's because you're totally oblivious to the fact it was ever even there. Or here. Y'know? I gotta admit, I'm no expert. I'd never willingly explore this place if people weren't in danger; keeping the worlds separate is in everybody's best interest." A grotesque chandelier hung above them, dripping with more stringy, black fluid that looked almost like it had been secreted from somewhere. Secreted by the house itself?

"The house was built in the 12th Century," Clara reminded her, "And that painting was done in the 16th Century. So they definitely exist separately. Who knows – all the tragedies might just be coincidences building and building until these terrors have the ability to bleed through the rupture they've made; they might not have _caused_ anything themselves."

"Although this hell-hole is certainly enough to drive somebody to suicide, like our ghostly Sir Tristram. Can't say that I'd much like if we had a cellar with a gateway to hell inside of it," the Doctor continued.

"No, that is a fair point…" Clara mused.

They passed from the large entranceway to a side-room, very tentatively and with Clara going first, but far from being the dining room or study Mattie had been assuming, she was met with quite possibly the most fantastically horrifying scene she had yet witnessed. Knighton Gorges Manor, even as it had looked in Mrs Ward's photo, did not exist in its full state. Instead, half of it had been ripped completely away as though by a tremendous disaster. The exterior wall was completely gone, leaving behind just splinters and a decaying fireplace stood eerily on the edge of the collapsing floor. It allowed them their first look at the outside, where it was impossible to state whether it was night or day; everything was grey and gloomy, and the moon in the sky was a terrible, glowing black – like a negative image, or an eclipse. But what it illuminated was a sea of shiny, shadowy spires, distinctly gothic but also what she would describe as 'alien.' Like someone had set fire to Manhattan and left its smouldering, ash-covered corpse to be rebuilt in the style of H.R. Giger.

"Jesus," said Clara, "This place is John Ruskin's wet dream."

"You are _so_ inappropriate sometimes," the Doctor snapped at her. Large, bat-like creatures flew in swarms high above – the 'night-gaunts' she kept hearing about? Was it those who had picked up Jack and Rose? Who had thrown Church's corpse at her house? "You doing okay, Matts? This is, uh… y'know, it sorta looks like _Blade Runner_. Only, less depressing."

"Less depressing than _Blade Runner_?" Clara questioned her.

"Well, what is there to like about _Blade Runner_?" the Doctor challenged.

"You're saying you'd rather be here than in _Blade Runner_ 's Los Angeles?"

"Depends on if they have any good ramen here. If they have good ramen here, then yeah. Good ramen is, like, _literally_ the only thing _Blade Runner_ LA has going for it."

"And young Harrison Ford."

"Can't say I ever think about young Harrison Ford."

"That makes one of us."

"You two are so jaded," Matilda interrupted, "You're both, like, basically _indifferent_ to this."

"Yeah…" Clara sighed, "That's why everybody tries to keep you away from all this, sweetheart. Your parents don't want you to get like any of us."

"I don't see a monster pit out there. Y'know – I'll tell you what we should've done," the Doctor began, "Should've tied a rope around ourselves and then left it attached to a tree out there. Like _Poltergeist_."

"This place is _huge_ , and those bat-things can _fly_ ," Mattie pointed out, "They could have carried Jack and Rose _anywhere_."

"She's right," said Clara, "They could be miles away."

"No, no. If they've been waiting here for centuries _just_ for Jack and Rose to show up so they can, I guess, absorb their power or whatever – well, why would they set up shop far away?" Thirteen asked.

" _Because they can fly_ ," Matilda reiterated.

"The big eyeball thingy can't fly. Probably. And it looked like it was underground."

"So what?" Clara said, "We were _just_ underground, in the cellar, and there was no big pit."

The Doctor paused and crossed her arms, perplexed. Could they afford to systematically investigate the area?

"Okay, maybe if we trick one of those things, they'll totally take us to it?"

"Ex- _cuse_ me!?" Clara exclaimed, "You want to use us to bait the night-gaunts!? What's to say they won't just drop us like dead weights!?"

"It's just an _idea_."

"It's the worst idea I've ever heard," Mattie grumbled.

"I'm _spit-balling_ , jeez. Gimme some leeway. I'm sure if we hang around for long enough, an idea will just-"

A blood-curdling roar sounded from somewhere above them. All Matilda saw above was the ceiling of the ruins of Knighton Gorges though, no source of the sickening sound. It didn't sound like any animal or human she recognised, but she should hardly be surprised about that. It would probably be stranger if she _did_ recognise it, quite frankly.

Without hesitation, the Doctor left the building. She jumped from the edge of the splintered floorboards into the outside of the Unnameable – much to Clara's chagrin. Mattie followed Clara to the edge to see where the Doctor had gone, but the drop wasn't very far. She'd simply descended onto the unpleasant landscape below, which looked like it was made of granite or a similar stone yet sank slightly beneath the Doctor's feet; what kind of stone was soft like that? Clara did not descend, instead shouted at the Doctor, which the latter ignored; Mattie stayed by Clara, as instructed, as the Doctor began to walk away from the house, glancing over her shoulder at the sky every few seconds. The creatures in the sky didn't pay them any notice in the slightest.

Finally, the Doctor stopped, entranced by whatever she saw above the house.

"This is so whack!" she shouted, "You gotta come see! I've, like, totally found them!"

"Oh, for – that woman is incorrigible…" Clara grumbled, following in the Doctor's footsteps and dropping down carefully onto the bizarre, rocky terrain below. She wobbled upon landing, visibly dismayed by the strange texture of the ground. "Come on, I'll catch you if you slip," she beckoned Mattie to follow.

"Are you sure I can't just go back in the portal…?"

"She said she found them – we'll be gone soon, I'm sure. And you'll get to say you conquered the evils of a dark dimension, or something," Clara said, waiting beneath the craggy floors for Mattie to follow.

"Who am I going to say that to?" she grumbled. Clara didn't say anything else, only waited for Matilda to follow her instructions, which inevitably Matilda did. She carefully lowered herself down from the edge of the floorboards, trying not to get splinters in her hand, and jumped. Upon landing she staggered and nearly fell over, but Clara made good on her promise to catch her.

"Steady," she said, "It's a bit like walking on a bouncy castle out here." That _did_ describe what it was like quite well, as they hobbled over the weird material to join the Doctor in the distance. What Thirteen had seen, however, was almost completely indescribable. Behind the Manor, the landscape began to curve, arcing steeply upwards and curling. It was almost like standing beneath an enormous tsunami, only a frozen one made of black, soft stone. There, high above them and suspended in the air, was the eyeball-teeth-creature in the painting, and two very small figures dangling from a wooden structure. Only, they were dangling _upwards_ , _towards_ the thing. It was like gravity twisted along with the surface, so everything above them was completely upside-down.

"That's topsy-turvy for you, huh?" the Doctor quipped, putting her hands on her hips. "Insane in the membrane. Toldja they wouldn't be too far."

"But how do we get up there…?" Mattie asked.

"Just walk," said the Doctor, "C'mon, let's get going."

"Hang on – we don't even have a plan," Clara grabbed her arm and stopped her, "That _thing_ is huge, and Jack and Rose aren't even awake. Plus, if nobody's alerted to our presence now, they definitely will be after we let them go because they'll start kicking up a fuss."

"The plan is grab them and go."

"That's not a plan."

"It usually works. What's _your_ bright idea if you think we need a plan so badly?"

"…Try and call them again?" Clara suggested, "Maybe phones work here. If we're in the same dimension now…"

"I wouldn't bank on it, and what good would it do? It'll just bug that thing. If it's gonna see us, it'll already have done so; it has like, a bajillion eyes, Clara." The creature loomed perilously above them, almost directly overhead. "Do you think it's more than twenty metres away?"

"Yes," said Clara stiffly. Mattie wasn't sure she had all the necessary information to understand this exchange.

"Right, but, if you get halfway – the gravity will shift and-"

"This is a pointless discussion. You _know_ I can't just teleport whenever I feel like it," Clara said.

"Wait – you can only teleport twenty metres at a time?" Mattie asked, "While Rose can go literally anywhere in all of time and space?"

"Rose is totally OP," Thirteen said, "But if we can get them and then teleport right down here-"

"We can't rely on that," Clara argued with her.

"But Rose can't teleport in different universes. If you're worried about us being able to make a quick getaway, then this is a solid idea."

"But-"

"But nothing," the Doctor cut across her surprisingly coldly. Clara was taken aback as well. "What do you want to do? Leave them here? Say we tried our best, but decided we'd go on our way? We have no TARDIS, no other allies, and no way to contact them, unless we get lucky and Donna steps out of thin air and portals them away." For a moment, Mattie half expected Donna to actually materialise out of one of her fuzzy, black-and-white portals. Unfortunately, this didn't happen; they really _were_ on their own, with Jack and Rose's lives dangling perilously in the upside-down sky. "No one else is coming to help. It's just us." Clara clenched her jaw and mulled this over.

Bitterly, she finally relented. "You are so bloody headstrong sometimes… fine. _Fine_. Let's just walk right up to that thing. But if we die, I will be _very_ disappointed in you." The Doctor rolled her eyes as they began to walk towards the curving landscape.

"Wait, what do you mean, 'if we die'?" Mattie asked urgently.

"…Just a bad joke," Clara said. Clara _lied_ , more like. Did she really think they were in that much danger? That the thing with all the eyes would kill them?

"Besides, what's it even gonna do? Stare us to death? Lemme tell you – wish I knew that guy when I was fighting the Weeping Angels. There's no way they'd be able to escape his gaze; permanently stoned." Clara clearly didn't think much of this remark.

It was hard to describe what it was like to walk and have the world behind you curl around and around while, to your own perception, you remained perfectly upright. The ruined Knighton Gorges Manor sank into the horizon, set against the distant, nightmarish city of neo-gothic spires, while they dragged their feet over the sludgy stones. It didn't feel as though there was much point in talking as they advanced, Mattie getting increasingly worried about what would happen when they drew close enough to the monstrous mass of eyes for it to truly perceive them – if it hadn't already. Jack and Rose, too, swam into view, Mattie squinting to make them out properly. The structure they were hanging from looked a little like gallows, only one large enough that it reached out its beam over the edge of the pit below – and there was the fact that they were strung up by their feet, not their necks.

"Why d'you think they're unconscious?" Mattie whispered.

"No idea," said the Doctor, "I guess maybe it's something to do with the way they can exert power over the human psyche. If they can communicate with people through their dreams and nightmares, I'm sure they can cause people to faint."

"People faint _constantly_ in Lovecraft," Clara said, "Right before something pivotal happens. It's totally lazy."

"But I thought you like him?" Mattie questioned.

"It's complicated. Especially if he's mining this parallel dimension for all his ideas… and he was a racist and anti-Semite."

"What, really?"

"Oh, yeah. That's why I've never gone to meet him."

"Good ol' Howie and his white supremacy," the Doctor muttered sarcastically, "What a gent."

"How long ago did he live?"

"He died in 1937," Clara answered. Mattie was left to mull over this revelation as they continued their approach. There were none of the bat creatures hovering around, they were all still in their clouds in the sky, but the eyeball-thing writhed around grotesquely in its pit.

It was hard to comprehend how a creature made entirely of eyes and teeth could really exist, and even harder to explain the way it moved – it reminded her of a pit full of snakes or worms, insects constantly crawling over each other, its surface bristling. The freakiest thing was that none of the eyes had eyelids, they perpetually stared off in a million different directions. On top of that was the sheer _scale_ , it was like somebody had filled an Olympic swimming pool with offal. But if it _had_ noticed them, it gave no indicator of this. They drew up sickeningly close, only a few metres away from the rim of the pit – which was very nearly overflowing with its mass – and everything remained as it was.

Clara went ahead first, skirting the edge of the hole, inching towards Jack and Rose's device of imprisonment. Now, hanging perilously above them, was the derelict mansion where they had just been minutes ago. Gravity clearly did not work according to the laws of physics, not unless there was some invisible, imperceivable centrifuge in the air nearby. Once Clara reached the wooden gallows, which were also coated in the same grisly, dark grey fluid that leaked from the pores of the house beneath, she began to examine them.

"C'mon," Thirteen whispered to Mattie, following Clara. Not wanting to be stranded out there, Mattie did just that. There did not appear to be any kind of helpful release mechanism, nor was there a way to rotate the arm away from the monster to their relative safety. The flying night-gaunts must have tied them out there, she assumed. So what were they to do? "Could you, like, float out there?"

"Maybe…" Clara said, "But I'd, um… rather _not_." She glanced worryingly at the creature.

"Could climb up?" Mattie suggested.

"That's only slightly better than the floating idea."

"But if you quit hesitating, we could just get them and go. It's not like your telekinesis can't manage it, Coo; they're not _that_ heavy, I don't think," said the Doctor.

"Why don't _you_ climb up then?" Clara snapped.

"If you really think I-"

"No."

"Couldn't they untie themselves?" Matilda began, "If they were awake?"

"I'm not sure that it would be very productive for us to wake them up have them see the situation they're in," Clara hypothesised, "If they start freaking out, they'll draw attention."

"We're going to draw attention when we get them _anyway_ ," the Doctor said, looking around at her feet for something, "Y'know, this is the problem with you academic-types."

"In what world are you not _also_ an 'academic-type'?" Clara quipped, but the Doctor ignored her and carried on what she had been saying as she now stooped down and picked up a fist-sized rock, soft like wet clay.

"You spend all your time thinking, but never _doing_!" She hurled the rock, to Clara's utter horror. Mattie didn't know if it was lucky or not that Thirteen had good aim in this instance, when the slimy rock hit Rose Tyler square in the face. It was enough to wake her up, but the rock fell and landed in the nest of eyeballs somewhere, which the creature surely didn't enjoy any more than Rose had. She blinked, then opened her eyes _wide_ upon seeing the monster.

"Oh my _god_!" Rose shrieked, then launched into a tirade of screamed swear-words while she wrestled with the ropes keeping her attached to the gallows.

"Rose," Clara hissed, " _Rose_."

"HEY!" the Doctor shouted. Clara elbowed her for that. "Ow! What'd I do?"

" _What did you do_!?" Clara asked her, furious.

"What the fuck is going on!?" Rose shouted at them.

"Could you keep the noise down?" Clara asked as quietly as she could.

"What!?" Rose called.

" _Could you_ -"

"I can't hear you! Why aren't you helping us!? Jack! _JACK_!"

The groaning, gut-churning growl they had heard from the house sounded again. Only this time they could see the source of it was, quite obviously, the eyeball-thing they had been trying so carefully not to disturb. Clara was about as angry as Mattie was scared by this development, as the Doctor began shouting panicked directions for Rose to try and untie herself (despite Rose asking what good it would do to untie herself when she would just plummet directly into the monster's belly – if it had one.) Like they were all attached to unseen tentacles, the eyes and fangs began to twist much faster, more chaotically, clearly agitated. Was it going to summon the bat-things? Tie them up as well? Devour all five of them?

But then, when Mattie was beginning to steel herself for what she was sure was her inevitable death, thinking that at least it may give her a chance to see her parents once again, the creature began to speak:

 _mY…LiTtLe… bOy…?_


	11. Nowhere Girl - Chapter 5

_Nowhere Girl_

 _5_

"Your, uh… your what-now?" the Doctor asked.

 _mY … LiTtLe … bOy_

it said, in a voice Matilda heard come distinctly from within her own mind. Hearing the words made her head pound, and it looked notably uncomfortable for Clara next to her, as well.

"Yeah. I thought that's what you said," Thirteen continued.

 _dO … YoU … kNoW …_ An especially long pause. _HiM?_

It clearly took the thing a tremendous amount of effort to communicate. Mattie put her hands on her head.

 _mY … SoN …_ Another long pause. _mY … sWeEt … oC'tHuBhA_

"Oc'thubha!? He's your _kid_?"

 _i … aM … MuMmY_

"Yeah, you sure are…"

"WHOA!" Jack yelled when Rose finally managed to swing enough from her ropes to knock right into him and wake him up. He, too, immediately laid eyes on the creature in the pit, the wriggling, staring lump. "Holy mother of god!"

 _yEs … MuMmY_

"This is the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me," Matilda said. She could hardly even believe that this was actually happening, that she wasn't in a dream or a nightmare – though she could no longer tell which it would be. Jack and Rose were now both struggling against their bindings. How long had they been upside down for? People could die from being upside down for too long.

"Why aren't you two doing anything to help us!?" Rose shouted at them, "And _why_ have you brought Mattie here!? This isn't safe, Clara!"

"What!?" Clara exclaimed, "Why are you having a go at _me_!? I wanted to come on my own!"

"Hey, HEY!" the Doctor cut across them both before they had much of a chance to fight, "Could everybody just calm down for a second so I can talk to this… uh, lady!?" Mattie was surprised that Rose actually listened to this Doctor; she'd so rarely seen Thirteen even attempt to command any authority. Apparently, this was because she saved that ability for when it was needed the most. She waited to make sure they actually _were_ going to be quiet, then continued. "Okay. _Yes_ , we know Oc'thubha."

 _mY … oC'tHuBhA_

"I hardly think it's easy to get him mixed up with some _other_ Oc'thubha. He's actually a good friend of my daughter's," the Doctor approached the edge of the pit and crossed her arms, studying the mass of eyes, "I'll make you a deal. I'll tell you everything I know about your son, if you tell me why you've kidnapped my friends here and what you're doing trying to create a portal to our dimension." There was a very long wait and then it groaned:

 _…dEaL_

"Alright. Glad we're making some progress here. Tell me what you want with Earth first."

 _mY … SoN … i … MiSs HiM … DeArLy … hE wAs … BaNiShEd … i DiD nOt … wAnT HiM … tO gO_

"Wait, wait, wait… this _whole thing_ is so that you can try and contact your estranged son who was banished to Earth, like, nearly two centuries ago?"

"If that's true," Matilda interjected, "Then why is there a five-hundred-year-old painting made of human skin showing Jack and Rose down in the cellar of that house?"

"Yeah – that's a good question," the Doctor said.

 _TiMe … iN tHiS rEaLm … iS bEyOnD … YoUr cOmPrEhEnSiOn … FoR … oNe ThOuSaNd … eArTh yEaRs … i hAvE bEeN … aLoNe_

"But what do you want with them? Why have you had them brought here? And why have you been manipulating Mrs Ward and countless others from through here?"

 _i aM … AnGiOmBrOhL … i SeE … TiMe iTsElf … i OnLy SeE … TiMe_

"What do you mean, you 'only' see time?"

 _i … aM … bLiNd … tHeSe eYeS … SeE nOtHiNg_

"Kind of ironic," commented the Doctor, "You're literally made almost entirely out of eyes."

 _oLiVe WaRd … wAs mY fRiEnD … sHe wAs SaD … i ToLd hEr … HuMaNiTy iS mEaNiNgLeSs … tHeRe iS nO nEeD … fOr SoRrOw … wHeN yOuR eXiStEnCe … iS eMpTy_

"You told her her human life has no meaning to try and cheer her up!?"

 _WiTh nO mEaNiNg … iS nO fEaR … sHe MiSiNtErPrEtEd … mY mEsSaGe …_

"You know she's dead?" That had not been the right thing to say. The hideous, growling wail pierced the air again, and Mattie clamped her hands over her ears.

"You've upset it!" Jack complained loudly.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Thirteen panicked, "I thought you knew! But it was kinda your fault, I mean, don't you know that telepathically communicating with humans makes them have brain haemorrhages? When Oc'thubha crashed to Earth in a meteor, he accidentally caused a plague before he learnt how to better communicate without hurting anybody. They built a whole sanatorium in the middle of a lake."

 _sHe LoSt hEr cHiLdRen … tHeY hAvE LoSt ThEiR fRiEnDs … i wAnT … tO mAkE … hUmAnS … hApPiEr … i wAnT … mY SoN … tO bE pRoUd oF … HiS MuMmY_

"Newsflash," Rose said angrily, "Kidnapping and brainwashing people _does not_ make them happy. Seems like you're the one misinterpreting things."

 _i sAw … tHrOuGh TiMe … mAnY yEaRs aGo … tHaT yOu HoLd … tHe KeY …_

"What key?" Jack asked, "I don't have any key."

 _tHe pAiNTiNg … fOrEsEeS … yOu WiLL rEuNiTe mE … WiTh mY cHiLd … iF i bRiNg … yOu HeRe_

"So did _you_ do the painting?" the Doctor asked.

 _i eNjOy … aRt … iT LeTs mE … kEeP iN tOuCh WiTh … mY fEeLiNgS_

"…You know it's made of human skin and painted with blood? Do these humans you want to make happy _like_ you butchering them to make art supplies?" the Doctor persisted.

 _mR tRiStRaM … mY fRiEnD … tHrEw HiMsELf iNtO … tHe LaKe … i bRoUgHt HiM hErE … hE tHoUgHt hE … wAs uSeLeSs … i WaNtEd HiM … tO fEeL uSeFuL_

"But why paint something if you can't see it?"

 _tHe MiNiOnS … aRe sTuPiD … tHeY nEeDed … tO sEe … wHo i wAnTeD … tHeM tO bRiNg … i aM sOrRy … aBoUt tHe KiTtY … wHeN i HeArD … wHaT tHeY hAd DoNe … i DeVoUrEd tHeM_

"Okay then…" said the Doctor. Hardly anybody else had said a word, none of them knowing quite what to make of this situation. The cosmic monster _wasn't_ evil? It was a misguided mother looking for her lost son with methods which left much to be desired? "You mean the two night-gaunts that use the portal? They're dead now?"

 _dEaTh iS diFfErEnT … hErE_

"But they can't use that portal anymore to get to our universe?"

 _nO_

"Hey – I'm still confused about this future-predicting painting," said Rose, "What, exactly, does this painting show? Because I can see all of time as well, and I'd really appreciate a more thorough explanation."

"It's not that complicated – this nice old lady here knew that, somehow, bringing you and Jack here would lead to her being able to contact Oc'thubha. So it's come true, because Clara and I came to rescue you, and _we_ know how to talk to Oc'thubha. I'm friends with him on myspace; he's super into Taylor Swift."

 _mY … sPaCe?_

"Oh, for god's sake…" Rose groaned.

"Yeah, like, social media," the Doctor continued.

"What do _you_ know about social media?" Clara questioned her, speaking for the first time in a while, "You won't even get a phone."

"I use MSN! And so does Oc'thubha."

"It's beyond me how you even manage to access MSN in 2064, it's been defunct almost as long as we've been married," Clara complained.

 _hOw iS … mY SoN?_

"Oh," said the Doctor, "Well, he's great, as far as I know. He lives in these mines underneath a village and teaches them all to be nicer to each other. He made them a cook book. My daughter, actually, years ago, she went to live in the village with her girlfriend at the time – they're married now – and worked in a bakery your son, like, enabled the existence of. She's a trained chef, and she always said that Oc'thubha's recipes are her favourite recipes she's ever tasted." The Doctor smiled warmly when she talked about Jenny.

 _yOuR … dAuGhTeR_

"Yeah. She's called Jenny. My little girl. I don't know how I'm gonna tell her about…" she paused and cast a glance at Matilda, then sighed. But a second later she took Mattie by surprise by turning to her properly to explain what she meant, "The only reason Jenny started trying to keep herself safe was because she was scared of what your mother would do to her if she didn't. Since Martha was always the one who had to fix her up." She smiled a sadly. Mattie didn't know how to react. Clara stepped over to her and put her hand on her arm.

"Are you alright?" she asked quietly.

"I'm fine." She didn't know if she _was_ fine, only that the shock and horror of what she was experiencing currently was burying her aching grief. She supposed she was as fine as she could be, given the circumstances.

"Look, I'll tell you what I'll do, uh… what did you say your name was again?" the Doctor resumed addressing the eyeball-thing.

 _AnGiOmBrOhL_

"Alright, Angie – I'm cool to call you Angie, right?"

 _i … LiKe … AnGiE_

"Awesome, so, what I'll do – because I'm swell like that and I really know what it's like when you're missing your only kid-"

 _i hAvE … a tHoUsAnD cHiLdReN_

"Well… my point still stands. I'll get you a computer and have Oc'thubha get in touch with you, if he wants to, and you're gonna let my friends go and stop trying to communicate with humans and sending your 'minions' through the portal. Capiche?"

 _cAp… iChE?_

"I mean, do you understand?"

 _I … uNdErStAnD … AnYtHiNg fOr mY SoN_

* * *

Matilda stared vacantly into space while Rose Tyler yelled in front of her. Yet again, everybody was talking _about_ her, but nobody was talking _to_ her; Rose took great issue with her accompanying Clara and the Doctor to the Unnameable world of cosmic phantasmagoria, despite her admission that leaving Mattie on her own in the house wouldn't be in her best interest, either. Whatever they were going to do about 'Angie', whether the Doctor would make good on her promise to deliver a computer and open a line of computer with her estranged, monstrous son, was something she kept being told not to worry about. Had the Doctor lied about her intentions? Was she just going to seal Angie away?

She felt dazed and woozy as she sat in the armchair in her living room which her mother used to occupy, something she was hardly thinking about now in her all-encompassing numbness. Mattie was hardly even perceiving the words or the volume of Clara and Rose's one-sided argument, which consisted of Rose's anger and Clara's half-hearted rebuttals. Jack had left as soon as they had returned to go to the hospital and make 'arrangements' he was even more unwilling to divulge to her after her 'trauma' so far that day. It was as soon as things had stopped happening to her that she'd returned to melancholy, however; it had ironically been almost _easier_ to function when she had other things to focus on, when Jack and Rose were in desperate need of their help, when there was some kind of mystery. But now she felt like she was surrounded by the dead: her parents, Mrs Ward, Church… and she had still never been allowed to attend a funeral. Perhaps she had never learnt to cope properly… was there a proper way to cope?

"That's enough," the Doctor finally stopped Rose, "I take responsibility, okay? I didn't want Mattie to be on her own and I didn't want to be away from my wife. What's done is done, you shouting isn't going to help anything." It was almost like Rose _enjoyed_ taking lumps out of Clara, until somebody came to her defence. Though she had begun blocking out all the noise, when they finally quietened, she felt a real sense of relief – for a few seconds, at least, until it was supplanted by a very intense feeling of displacement.

"I don't want to be here," she murmured, looking at the floor, "I don't want to be in this house. Not… n-not with Mrs Ward down the road like that, and that _house_ just…" She clenched her fists and sank in the chair. To think, some hours ago, she had been so horrified by the prospect of leaving her home there on the Isle of Wight, but now just being there so close to the otherworldly portal and its nightmarish inhabitants – even if Angie hadn't ultimately been a malevolent world-destroyer – made her feel sick. Or perhaps that was because a thing from another universe had been telepathically communicating with her.

"Where do you want to go, sweetheart?" Clara asked her softly, the Doctor and Rose remaining in their minor stand-off, neither particularly impressed with the other. "You can stay on the TARDIS. The phones are working again, so-"

"Mickey and Martha wouldn't want her on the TARDIS," Rose argued with her. Clara paused, clearly frustrated by Rose, but didn't argue. Instead she turned her gaze imploringly on Mattie, crouching down in front of her chair.

"Do you want to come with us to Brighton? Not that this has to be a decision about where you want to live, but if you want to go somewhere else that's more, you know, solid and familiar, you're more than welcome," Clara said. Matilda just about managed to nod. She actually liked the idea of spending some time in Brighton – it was supposed to be nice there, after all.

"If the funeral's going to be in London, then…" she began, but didn't her finish her sentence.

"Yeah. Yeah, course, Brighton's a lot closer than Newport," Clara nodded, "Takes fifteen minutes on the levitating trains to get to London. Alright, Matts, you go pack a small bag and try not to think about too much. I'll drive you."

"Are you sure, Coo?" the Doctor asked, "That's, like, almost a three-hour journey. And there's no car here, Jack took it when he left."

"I could just teleport you," Rose suggested stiffly.

"I like long drives," Matilda mumbled.

"So do I," Clara smiled at her the tiniest amount, then turned back to Thirteen, "I'll just borrow one from the TARDIS; you have to bring it down anyway to get a computer. And talk to Jenny."

"…Right. Yeah. No, if that's what you want, then…" the Doctor was obviously not thrilled by the prospect of delivering Jenny the bad news. But then, who would be? "I guess me and Rose will have to wrap up everything here." Mattie had never been able to work out exactly what Thirteen and Rose thought of one another, whether they liked each other or not; but most of their issues seemed to stem from differing opinions on Clara Oswald, which Clara herself cared little for.

"Go upstairs," Clara bade Matilda, "When you come back down, we'll be ready to go; you don't have to stay here if you don't want, promise." Mattie did just that, glad of an excuse to leave her living room and its uncomfortable atmosphere. She hoped they didn't start shouting again as soon as she was gone.

Packing even a small bag was no easy task, however. She found herself struggling to choose what she wanted to take, especially since she didn't know how long she would be away from the house for. She wasn't even sure she wanted to come back to it, and wondered if that made her a bad person… but she hadn't grown up there. Five of her fifty years had been spent on the Isle of Wight, and the furniture her parents brought with them bore more sentimental value than the walls. She found a backpack and stuffed some of her clothes in it, as well as her computer, and an old blanket she kept on her bed. Then she glimpsed out of the corner of her eye a toy narwhal she'd had for decades, one which had needed to be sewn up and mended by her dad on more than one occasion. He was called Blob and was perched on top of her wardrobe, but now, on a whim, she decided she would take him with her. The last thing in her bag was her old pair of glasses her mum made her take everywhere in case something happened to the ones she was wearing; even wearing old glasses was vastly preferable to wearing no glasses, she had that many problems with her eyesight. She was almost as blind as Angie.

While she organised all this, she didn't hear the arguments begin again downstairs. All she heard was the thrumming of the TARDIS arriving outside and her front door opening and closing. She made a point to wait around in her bedroom for a few minutes to give them a chance to get this fabled car, during which time – to her horror – she realised she had nearly forgotten her mum's letter. Mattie crept out of her own room, backpack slung over one shoulder, and into her parents' bedroom again where the letter remained. On one last whim she also swiped a family photo of the three of them her mum kept on the bedside, her when she was much younger, shot in black and white, everybody smiling. Was it strange that she wanted to take their most mundane possessions, as well? Her dad's old alarm clock, the glass her mum kept out in case she wanted a drink in the night? But for the time being, she left those behind. She _would_ come back to the house and retrieve these seemingly meaningless objects, eventually. When she could stomach being so close to that portal again.

Mattie left the room and descended the stairs into the hallway, where her front door was slightly ajar. She picked the spare keys up from where they'd fallen down next to the shoe rack and went outside, where it was still as unnaturally chilly as it had been that morning. It felt more like March than July. The only person left now was Clara, who was smoking. The TARDIS stood nearby with its doors closed. Clara hurried to try and finish her cigarette once Mattie appeared.

"Smoking's bad for you, by the way," she said hastily, "Don't ever start doing it." Mattie was much too distracted to pay attention to Clara's bad habits though, because next to her stood one of the sleekest, fanciest cars she'd ever seen. Cobalt black, low to the ground, large wheels almost totally obscured by the bodywork to give the impression it was floating, and a top 'pod' made entirely out of darkened glass. She recognised it well as the car that had been plastered all over the news recently: CyTech's 'Omnio.'

"Isn't that a prototype car?" Mattie asked, staring at it.

"Something like that," Clara shrugged, "Adam Mitchell said I can take it out. Wants to see how it copes with the three hours back to Brighton." The car was being celebrated because of its being made of affordable, sustainable materials, while also being potentially entirely self-driving (though, all cars were) and powered _exclusively_ by the solar glass its windows and pod were made of. And it was meant to run completely silently. It was what companies had been promising to do with their cars for decades. "I'll tell you what, my first car was a bright red Ford Ka from 2006, and I still had it when I met the Doctor seven years later. Seems like so long ago now… people used to make fun of electric cars back then."

"Really? Why?"

"Well, they were a bit rubbish," Clara said, taking one last, long drag on her cigarette before dropping it to the ground and stamping it out, "Couldn't go very fast, took hours to charge, had to plug them in… people didn't care quite as much about climate change. Anyway, come on. Rose'll bring the Doctor back home in a few hours."

"Will they be okay? Going back there?" Mattie asked as she approached the passenger door. After Clara unlocked it with a button on a set of keys, Mattie only had to touch a sensor on the door for it to slide open, directly upwards. This was to stop car doors banging into things, like she remembered they used to do a long time ago. She shoved her backpack in the footwell and got in, glancing at the TARDIS.

"Oh, they'll be fine," Clara assured her, "They'll be able to take more equipment with them, and some backup. Oswin's studied parallel dimensions extensively."

"You're not worried at all?"

"I'm always worried about what my wife might be doing," Clara sighed, "She gets into trouble a _lot_. But they can handle it. And they're going to talk to Oc'thubha about it first, fact-check everything." There was next to no indicator that Clara had started the engine, which she did by just flicking a switch, except for all the lights coming on. The car remained utterly silent. Clara turned off the automatic driving after putting on her seatbelt and pressed down on the accelerator, the car gliding soundlessly through the trees and away from Mattie's house. Just like the hospital, she watched it disappear in the wing mirror. Now, with every passing minute, she would be going further and further away from her parents' home, and they themselves.

Soon enough, they were on the road again, following the car's built-in, digital satnav. All the readouts were projected onto glass screens. Mattie slouched down against the car door, crossing her arms tightly, enjoying the smooth motion of the vehicle as well as its heater. It was the first time she'd actually felt warm in hours.

"Don't you have your own car?" she asked eventually.

"Well, uh…" Clara grew awkward, "We _did_ … and then the Doctor borrowed it and crashed it into a tree… and then we got another one from Adam, a Ferrari, and then I… accidentally drove it through a spatial-temporal rift and we got stuck in London in 1912 for a while… since then we've been carpooling to get to work with a colleague. But the Doctor's just bought this write-off camper van she plans on fixing up over the summer."

"Camper van?"

"Yeah, this Volkswagen Westfalia from Nineteen-Sixty-Something. She's got some special TARDIS-blue paint to do it over with and plans on building an electric engine from scratch. Should be done by the time we have to go back to work in September."

"Why a camper van?"

"Oh, I don't know, just one of those ideas she gets in her head," Clara said fondly, keeping her eyes on the road, "Maybe she wants to go camping without having to pitch a tent. I've never much liked camping in tents. I guess that's what's good about the TARDIS."

"Why'd you leave?"

"Bunch of reasons. I got tired of the transience, I suppose, never feeling like you're in the same place… I never got the chance to live out my life on Earth, and one day it just caught up with me and I didn't want to stay there anymore. Besides, it's good for Jenny to have the TARDIS for a while; she's doing fine taking the Doctor's place for the moment."

"Does the Doctor not _mind_ leaving the TARDIS?" Mattie persisted with her questions. Clara didn't seem to be too fazed, though.

"She misses it, but it's not like I'm trying to control her. We still spend time there because she goes to see Jenny and I have to visit my sister. Besides, we seem to get roped into dangerous situations regardless of if the TARDIS is around, today being a prime example…" Mattie grew quiet again, thinking about the day's events. It was very hard to keep it all straight in her mind. It had been the middle of the night when she had left the hospital, then she'd been woken up at seven by arguments downstairs, before being dragged around to a parallel universe no later than ten. It was now just after one o'clock, but the gloom hanging over the island was persistent, like being trapped in a dream.

It was certainly the strangest day of her life and felt to her about as unreal as a dream, like the events didn't really connect to each other, didn't work properly. She stared at the digital "13:08" on the car's dashboard. It was still less than twelve hours since her parents had taken their last breaths… she felt stray tears playing at her eyes again, now that there was nothing leftover to distract her. But in spite of everything the car was especially lulling, and she did feel calmer the further they got from the horror of Knighton Gorges Manor. Places like that were the reason her parents had never wanted her to spend time on the TARDIS, were the reason they wanted her to go live an ordinary life in Brighton. She didn't want to go against their wishes, and maybe it wasn't as much of a wonderful daydream as she had always pictured it. The danger present in their stories suddenly felt palpable, threatening… even Clara didn't enjoy the instability of a life of constant travelling… she herself had never _liked_ moving around so much… so many different houses, and places … how long would it be until they reached the Solent Tunnel? … it had windows along some of its length, illuminating the seafloor … but she had never seen anything interesting … no fish … maybe this time there would be plenty of fish … a narwhal, like Blob … she had always wanted to see a narwhal …

"Mattie?"

Somebody shook her shoulder and she was startled. The first thing she saw was the car clock, only now it read "14:51." But she had only closed her eyes for a moment, hadn't she?

"Matts." It was Clara.

"Huh?" she asked, woozy. Her glasses had slipped down to the edge of her nose, and when she went to rub her eye she accidentally pressed her palm onto the lenses, getting them covered in sweat from her hands.

"You fell asleep, sweetheart," Clara explained.

"Were there any whales?" she mumbled.

"Where?"

"In the tunnel."

"Oh. No, you didn't miss anything cool, don't worry. They didn't have the lights turned on for the windows." The Solent Tunnel was the large tunnel built underneath the strait between the Isle of Wight and the British mainland, some thirty years old now, and unlike the Channel Tunnel it _did_ have windows in it. They were illuminated by outside lights, but there was rarely anything to see. The car was parked somewhere, bright sunlight agitating Mattie's eyes as she struggled to wipe her glasses clean on her sleeve.

"Where're we?" She squinted out of the window, but saw nothing except a clear, blue sky.

"We're at a service station just off the A27," Clara said, "Rose rang me, so I pulled in here."

"What did she want?"

"She says it's all resolved, they've given 'Angie' a computer and set it up to IM Oc'thubha, and broke the portal generator. Apparently, the bad weather on the island's really cleared up, but it's been alright ever since we came out of the tunnel. We're halfway between Chichester and Worthing. I'm _starving_ though, and I thought you might be, too." Now that Clara mentioned it, she _was_ ; she felt hungry for the first time in days. Why was that? Things had only gotten _worse_ … "Do you want something to eat? There's a McDonald's." She nodded, yawning. "Oh, and Jack texted me, said he wants you to know that everything is 'being taken care of' and you don't have to worry."

"Uh-huh…" she mumbled as she got out of the car. For some reason she brought her backpack with her, not wanting to part with it and the possessions within. Clara left her coat behind her on the front seat in a clump. Mattie's stomach rumbled slightly. After the day she'd had, the soaring, summer temperatures nearly renewed her state of shock. Luckily it was air conditioned inside the services and not particularly busy.

"What do you want?"

"Just, I don't know… chicken nuggets, or something…" She stayed non-committal about her food, going to find a table that was at least partially in shadow, while Clara disengaged to go use the screens to order. It was table service, so Clara wasn't away for more than a minute or two, pulling out the chair opposite Mattie with a numbered, cardboard placard. The only other person in that McDonald's was a trucker eating three Big Macs to himself.

"Are you feeling alright?" Clara asked.

"I guess."

"Have any good dreams?"

"Didn't have any at all." She crossed her arms on the table and leant on them, slouching forwards. "Does Rose hate you?"

" _Hate_ me? No," said Clara.

"It seems a bit like she does, sometimes."

"We're friends. Good friends, even. She just thinks I'm annoying, that's all, and for a long time she _really_ didn't like me – but things change. I'm the only other person who really understands what it's like being married to the Doctor, anyway, and that's something that can get _very_ frustrating sometimes."

"I heard a story once that she tried to kill you."

"She'd been given psychosis-inducing drugs, Matts," Clara said, "The part people always leave out about that story is that everybody else _also_ tried to kill each other. The Ponds tried to kill each other, and they're _married_. _Adam Mitchell_ tried to kill somebody. And you know, Rose is grieving as well right now – when she was shouting at me earlier, it's not _me_ she was really upset about, you know?"

"Sort of…"

"Rose just wants what's best for you."

"All anybody's been talking about is what's 'best' for me…" she grumbled.

"Well, that's because we all care about you," Clara said seriously. Then a server came over with a tray of food, a box of chicken nuggets, two drinks, and a chicken sandwich for Clara. Clara who promptly produced from one of her pockets and additional _three_ sachets of mayonnaise. When she lifted the bun from the top of her sandwich, Mattie saw it was already basically drenched in mayo.

"Were you just carrying that mayo around with you?"

"It's my emergency stash."

"'Emergency stash'? Of _mayo_?"

"You never know when you might need some mayonnaise at short notice, Matts," Clara said knowingly, as though this were legitimate advice a sane person would give. She proceeded to squeeze out the contents of _all three_ sachets onto her sandwich. "Wish I had some more…"

" _More_?"

"Mm…" Clara said, slurping her drink, which appeared to be a milkshake. Mattie just had lemonade, it seemed, and she sipped it tentatively, worried about her ability to keep down food.

"Is there, like, something wrong with you?"

Clara glared at her, "Shut up."

"How can you taste anything except for the mayonnaise?"

"I don't really _want_ to taste anything except for the mayonnaise."

"Eurgh."

Clara was indifferent, "Haters gonna hate."

" _Eurgh_ ," Mattie repeated herself, "Don't say _that_. You're too old."

"Too old?" Clara laughed.

"Yeah. You're ancient."

"I guess that makes you a hypocrite, then."

"No, I'd only be a hypocrite if I was as embarrassing as you are."

"Ouch," said Clara, taking a bite from her disgusting, mayo-soaked McChicken. It almost put poor Matilda off her nuggets (though, as soon as she bit into the first one she realised how famished she'd really been, and occupied herself for the next five or ten minutes with eating all nine of them.) After this time had passed, Clara informed her, "They've told the police about Mrs Ward, too…"

"Oh. What're the police gonna do?"

"They'll need to investigate her cause of death."

"Then what?"

"See if she had any last wishes."

"Will there be a funeral?"

"I… don't know. Sorry."

"She doesn't have anybody to go to a funeral… they're all dead… it must be awful. An empty funeral."

"I'll go," Clara offered, "You don't have to, but at least there'll be somebody there. Unless you _do_ want to go? But it's fine if you don't want to. Funerals aren't… they're not a good time. Had my first cigarette at a funeral."

"Whose?"

"Mum's. Long time ago. 2005."

"What was it really like?" Mattie asked cautiously, "If – if you don't mind me asking, I mean…" Clara stopped to think and eventually put down her half-eaten sandwich.

"It was the worst thing that's ever happened to me. Has anyone ever told you the story of how Rose met the Doctor?"

"Is that the one with the shop window dummies? Where they came to life?"

"…Yeah," Clara nodded slowly, "Yeah, that's what happened. It was those dummies who killed my mum. They shot her in front of me." Mattie felt sick again hearing this, hearing the lump in Clara's throat and seeing the haunted expression on her face. "I was sixteen. It was, uh… I mean… in some ways I've never really… I still have nightmares about it sometimes. Martha used to worry about me, wanted me to see somebody."

"…Nightmares?"

"Sort of, experiencing it all over again… felt like something's been ripped out of me… but it's not like I even tried to deal with it well, at the time, I just started smoking and drinking, which you won't be doing no matter _who_ you go live with. Dad was just never very good at telling me off, didn't know _what_ to do with me after that," Clara said, then changed tact. "But, you know, having good people around you helps. I got a lot better when I met Oswin, when my Echoes gave me a, sort of, purpose." She looked at the scar on her arm when she said that, a scar Mattie still hadn't heard the full story behind. She didn't want to push her luck and ask about that, though, not when Clara was already having such an obviously difficult time talking about her mother. "You'll be okay, sweetheart."

"…If I did live with you," she began, "Where would I stay?"

"Well, if you like, we thought you could have the loft. It's a conversion, so it's a proper room and everything. It's just got old bits and bobs up there at the moment. It's nice, though, it's got skylights, and it's big."

"Do you really not mind? You didn't even get any warning…"

"I told you, we'd be honoured to take you in."

"There's this, um… I mean, my parents, they always… every Saturday, we had this 'family dinner' where Rose always came over, and sometimes Jack… could that-"

"Jack and Rose are welcome to visit whenever they want, but yes, I'm more than happy to carry on having this family dinner on the weekends. And I'm sure the Doctor will be, too," Clara assured her. Mattie nodded, and then was resigned to silence while she finished her lunch over the next few minutes. She ate very slowly, but Clara didn't try to rush her. It was almost nice to have the quiet and the sunlight.

"It's weird how things carry on…"

"Yeah, it is," Clara agreed with her. "But, they do. We do. We have to. For them."

Matilda nodded, then repeated, "For them…"

* * *

"So, somebody's kind of already taken the username 'Angiombrohl,'" the Doctor confessed nervously. Angie wailed and writhed in her pit. "No – don't – it'll be totally cool, I'll just, like, throw a couple of numbers on the end."

"Or you could replace the letters with numbers," Rose said, "What if you swap the Os for 0s?" The Doctor nodded and tried this, sitting on the squishy, otherworldly ground with a desktop computer running Windows 98 in front of her. It was the first computer she could find hidden away on the TARDIS, a gigantic, cream-coloured brick Rose had needed to carry all the way there; it was running on a fission battery Oswin had rigged up that would last for a few millennia at least, but that wasn't making it go any faster.

"Alright, well, 'Angi0mbr0hl' with zeroes it's accepting," the Doctor said once a tiny loading bar had finally filled up. The night-gaunts swarmed above them, clearly interested in what was happening but luckily attacking. Not that she knew what they'd do if they _did_ attack, they didn't have any eyes or mouths, their faces completely blank. Rose kept a careful watch on them, an enormous gun slung across her back which Oswin had called a 'universal cannon.' It apparently packed enough punch to at least impair a cosmic god long enough to make an escape. Thirteen highly disapproved not just of Rose even bringing it, but of Oswin building it in the first place, calling it a 'counter-measure', like she didn't trust Oc'thubha. But today wasn't the day to start an argument like that with her sister-in-law. It had been bad enough breaking the news…

"What's the weird noise?" Rose asked.

"Dial-up," the Doctor explained, "It's more stable than wifi when you're trying to transmit between dimensions."

" _Dial-up_? Jesus, what year is it?"

"I like the noise," she said, "If I had a phone, I'd set the dial-up modem sounds as my ringtone. Y'know, for irony."

"If _you_ had a phone, I doubt it would be able to connect to the internet at all," Rose sighed, putting her hands in her pockets. Her mascara was still streaked across her face from her turbulent night. But her ordeal with being kidnapped by marauding night-gaunts appeared to have shaken her enough to put her grief on pause. "I don't know how you hold down a job without having a phone."

"I just give everybody Clara's number."

"It's almost like she's your secretary."

"A sexy secretary," she said, which made Rose turn her nose up disdainfully. So what if the Doctor sometimes thought of Clara as her sexy secretary? Not that she'd ever mention that to Clara, because Clara would probably get offended and start refusing to take any of her calls. But a girl could dream.

A notification on the computer, which had MSN sitting open, dinged.

"Would you look at that! You got a voice message from your son. I'll play it for you." She did just this, sonicking the computer to increase the volume of its frankly pathetic in-built speakers (though a computer of that age was lucky to have any speakers of its own at all.)

The noise which emitted from the machine was quite horrible. It was like listening to piercing radio feedback, coupled with an inhuman growl and violent static, bad enough to make both she and Rose plug their ears with their fingers. It drew on for what felt like an interminable ten seconds of grotesque vocalisations until the computer silenced again. Then they were subjected to another deafening screech from Angie in the pit.

 _mY … gOoD … bOy_

"Uh, yep, he's a good'un," Thirteen nodded awkwardly, "D'you think you're okay now? I've added myself to your contacts list, too, so feel free to just get one of your bat-boys up there to shoot me a message whenever."

"Do you even _have_ a computer of your own?" Rose continued.

" _Yes_ , one I built myself. It runs the History department timetable spreadsheet like. A. _Dream_. I Excel'd the _crap_ out of that syllabus."

"You are _so_ domesticated. Honestly, it's like the woman's castrated you. In fact, it literally is, since you were a boy before you met her."

"Ha, ha. I'll put the snide-ness of _that_ remark down to grief, thank you very much. Now, then, Ang, old-buddy-old-pal-old-friend, we've got some important business to attend to back in our own universe."

 _tHaNk … yOu … dOcToR_

"Don't mention it!" she said brightly, "I'm happy to reconnect you and your son. I know how much it sucks being apart from your kids…"

"And there's another kid I'd like to get back to," Rose said, turning to leave.

 _gOoD … bYe … fRiEnDs_

"Bye!" Thirteen waved, though Angie was blind and wouldn't be able to see.

"Yep, bye, Angie," Rose said, quick-walking away.

"See you around!"

Angie made an odd, guttural sound, which the Doctor took to be one of appreciation, as she hurried to catch up to Rose and her 'universal cannon.' Lucky they hadn't needed to use it.

"I can't believe you brought that dumb gun," she said quietly as they walked back towards the ruined Knighton Gorges Manor.

"I'm just not in the mood to take any chances today," Rose said, hunching her shoulders and glancing around the area suspiciously, like the night-gaunts were going to swoop down and attack them. Maybe Lovecraft had been wrong with his judgements of the creatures in the Unnameable – not that Oc'thubha had ever had anything nice to say about any of them, either. But clearly, they weren't _all_ bad. "It's not like I'm trigger-happy."

"Well… maybe her methods were unconventional and she made a few mistakes, but at least we helped her. At least something good came of everything that's happened…" the Doctor began. "Silver linings, y'know?"

"Won't be any silver linings if Mattie ends up traumatised by this."

"Rose, she'll be okay. She's resilient. Don't you remember when she was kidnapped by those Daleks? She was no worse for wear. She was even upset for a while that she wouldn't get to hang out with 'Pinkie' anymore. You oughta take some time out to worry about yourself a little here – instead of taking it all out on my wife."

"It's not my fault if she's…" but Rose didn't know how to finish her sentence.

"She's what? She's _there_?" Rose said nothing. "We're _all_ heartbroken here. There's no need for any of us to take it out on each other." Still nothing, so the Doctor lowered her voice and tried a different approach, "Are you mad at yourself because of what happened?" Rose stopped walking and turned to address her directly, growing suddenly frantic; they were just outside Knighton Gorges, where Rose would need to give the Doctor a boost to clamber back into the building itself.

"I should've seen this coming," she said, "I see _everything_ coming. And today, on a day _so important_ , where I'm the one who needs to protect Mattie – I couldn't. I couldn't even protect myself."

"It's not your fault, Rose. You just don't have any control over other universes. Most people don't have a single ounce of control over _any_ universes, including me. And Mattie's going to be okay. We're all looking out for her, and all of us have recovered from extreme loss in one way or another. _Everybody_ goes through death like this. We can't keep her in bubble-wrap."

"Keeping her in bubble-wrap and just not letting her hang around in a dangerous, alternate universe isn't the same thing."

"She wanted to help save you and Jack, and she didn't want to be on her own. Leaving her would have just made her feel more powerless than she must do already. And finally, you know, she's not as much of a little kid as we see her. She's _fifty_. I'm _sure_ that she's going to be alright in the end – don't you trust me?"

"Of course I trust you, stupid," Rose said, annoyed, clenching her jaw to hold off a fresh wave of tears. "I trust all the Doctors."

"Then can we just get out of here?"

Rose nodded and noticed the high floorboards they needed to scale, then sighed and lowered her hands to the ground so that the Doctor could step on them. This boost very nearly flung Thirteen across the room – it had been so many years and Rose _still_ didn't quite know her own strength. She slammed into the floor a little too hard for her liking.

"Sorry!" Rose apologised awkwardly, "I didn't mean to…" Rose didn't need any help to just vault herself up, landing with a thud near the Doctor as she struggled to her feet, a little dazed.

"It's fine… just might leave me with a bruise…" she rubbed her shoulder, wincing.

"…How are _you_ holding up? Apart from the bruise?"

" _Me_?"

"Nobody ever asks you, it's always you asking everybody else."

"I guess you're right. And who knows? I've lost so many people now… at the moment I just want to get back to Clara. What about you?" They descended down the narrow stairs back into the cellar with the slow-moving kinetic generator, about to be destroyed.

"I… I don't know. The Doctor's still doing the rounds…"

There was a strange pause between them, during which Rose looked at her feet.

"…If you wanna come back to Brighton with me, you're always welcome. You can come anytime – bonus points because you don't need a TARDIS to hide somewhere… and even you have to admit that Clara makes the _best_ hot chocolates, they're just what a gal needs at a time like this." She stepped into floating rings of the generator, Rose following her and thinking over these words.

The violent teleport gave them some pause though, as they were wrenched from one dimension to the next and that familiar sense of nausea swept through her. They were plucked from the ancient library and dropped into that muddy cave with its roof open to the grey skies; a slight drizzle had begun, making it sticky and even more damp. But it was a notable improvement than being in the Unnameable. In their universe the spinning rings were embedded into the cave walls rather than suspended in the air, making their destruction somewhat trickier… at least, the Doctor _thought_ it would be trickier.

"I should be able to just sever the connection," Rose said, her eyes both burning gold, indicating she was accessing the time vortex in some capacity. She blinked and it stopped. "I can't _destroy_ it because it exists half here and half there, but I can close the gate to preserve where we are. It's awful in there, you know. I can't see _anything_. I'm like the opposite of Angie, only able to see what's physically in front of me… how do people cope with it?"

"Beats me – but it sure must be a lot quieter than being able to see time and space."

Rose only had to touch her hand to one of the rings to make them cease up, and they immediately began to deteriorate until their silver was completely gone, discoloured and transformed into rusty husks. Nobody would be able to use them now.

"What about these books?" she indicated the ones left behind by Mrs Ward about her dalliances with the Unnameable and its inhabitants.

"Uh… leave them. I'll talk to the Gutkeleds; Sally will want to put them in the archive."

"If you're sure…"

"How about it, though?" Thirteen implored.

"About what?"

"Brighton."

"Oh."

"Mattie will want to see you today. You don't wanna be on your own while Jack's sorting out all the funeral arrangements. C'mon, you're not gonna throw your ex-girlfriend a bone?"

"You're definitely not my ex-girlfriend."

"I kind of am."

"I'll come to Brighton if you never call me your ex- _anything_ ever again."

"Well, I guess I can agree to that," she smiled.


	12. Nowhere Girl - Chapter 6

_Nowhere Girl_

 _6_

 **Three Days Later…**

Captain Jack Harkness cleared his throat.

"I've been asked to deliver a lot of speeches in my time, more than I can count. Weddings; parties; promotions. And funerals. I'm not going to pretend that I haven't said goodbye to a lot of people, and I'm also not going to pretend that I don't hate goodbyes, but today I'll say two of the hardest goodbyes of my life. I'd also like to apologise in advance; the truth is, I could stand up here for hours, and I still wouldn't be able to touch on how much Mickey Smith and Martha Jones meant to all of us, to each other, or to the world. So forgive me for the inevitability that things will be kept short.

"Both born and raised here, in Peckham, only a stone's throw from each other, it wasn't until 2009 that they met. And of course, thanks have to be given to the Doctor, without whom none of us would be here today and Mickey and Martha would most likely never have met – which would be the greater tragedy than what we're commemorating today. Mickey, a young mechanic who never even suspected he would become a hero someday, all his compassion spent on his grandmother who relied upon him; and Martha, a girl who dreamt of becoming a doctor and healing humanity from the day she broke her arm when she was just seven. It was when they came to work with me that they truly connected, and within a year they'd gone onto bigger and better things: married life and freelancing. I'm sure they were glad about not having me boss them around anymore. I won't get into the list of all the people they've saved, hearts they've touched, and planets they've rescued, but trust me – it's a long list, and anybody who was there with them should feel truly honoured. I know I do.

"And they might have continued saving lives for the rest of theirs, if there wasn't a new life of their own they had to take care of. Matilda was brought into this world, a world her parents worked so hard to improve, on the 10th of August 2014, five years after they first met, but it was as soon as they found out Martha was pregnant that she became the centre of their world. I remember because I was there that same day, and I, along with my co-godparent, Rose, promised Mickey and Martha that we would always do our best to keep Matilda safe and well. On that front, nothing's changed.

"The memories of who they were, what they accomplished, what they meant to us, and what they leave behind, are never going to leave us. It's important today to remember that Mickey and Martha wouldn't want us to spend the day sad and crying, they'd want us to use this as an opportunity to reconnect with each other. New friends, old friends, family close and distant: they would want us to cherish the happy memories of them, and I ask everybody to, rather than mourn, instead celebrate. Celebrate that we had the pleasure of knowing them at all, celebrate the billions of people who wouldn't be here if not for them, celebrate that life goes on. Because they would want us to go on, want us to keep living. Live twice, three times as hard, help three times as many people, and always remember it's the happy memories and moments that keep us truly human, and truly alive."

Clara Oswald's eyes were full of tears. In fact, there wasn't anybody she could see – except for Jack, who was masterful at keeping his respectful composure – who wasn't weeping. So much for him asking them to celebrate instead of mourn. It had been one of those eulogies where he said a lot without really saying anything at all, unable to go into detail about their time with the Doctor, their time battling alien invaders, travelling through time, et cetera. Then again, he was right about the list being too long for that. Mattie was clinging onto Rose on the front row, one ahead of Clara, crying very hard but very quietly; she had gotten through two packs of tissues that day already, and it was only eleven in the morning. Thirteen was on her right, by the wall. Oswin was on her left, Adam Mitchell next to her, Nios and Jenny on the end. Esther Drummond was somewhere further back with Ianto Jones, Gwen Cooper and Rhys Williams, the latter of whom were both elderly now, and their daughter Anwen – who was only slightly older than Mattie but aged at the ordinary pace. She had children now, Clara had overheard, but they weren't there. The Gutkeleds – Ravenwood and Sally Sparrow – wouldn't be showing up until the wake, since they couldn't actually enter a church. The Tenth Doctor was on the front row as well, as was Tish and her oldest son – Martha's nephew. Leo wasn't around anymore, either. Donna was on the second row but on the other side of the aisle, next to River Song who'd made a surprise appearance (she never came to events; Clara hadn't seen her for decades.) The rest of Martha's remaining relatives, and Mattie's cousins, were gathered on that side of the room, too, but Clara didn't know any of them.

The most painful thing of all was saying goodbye to the coffins. She didn't really know what you were supposed to do when you were given that opportunity, but everybody had it. After Jack stepped down, music began to play, signalling the end of the service. Once they left, the coffins would be taken by the undertakers into the crematorium.

"I never know what to say to the coffins," Clara whispered to her wife, whose hand she was holding.

"I don't know that you really have to say anything, Coo," the Doctor replied, "Just do what seems natural." What felt natural was pausing in front of the two coffins for a brief moment, after the family had already been and gone, but she didn't say anything. She didn't touch them, either; it felt like an intrusion. It became almost claustrophobic with everyone queuing to greet the coffins and then leave the chapel, and Clara was glad to be out of there, where she joined her limping sister on another grey, drizzly morning. Rose was looking out for Matilda, so Clara had time for her _other_ responsibilities.

"How are you doing, then?" she asked Oswin, who leant against the outside brick wall, trying to avoid the small crowd of funeral-goers gathering as the chapel emptied. The Doctor detached herself from Clara and slid away to find Jenny, who already appeared to have engaged some of Mattie's estranged relatives in friendly conversation, despite never having met them before. Adam Mitchell was checking his phone.

"I don't know. Always seems like a waste when people die…" she sighed, "I suppose nobody asked for my opinion, though… don't like funerals. I never got a funeral."

"Nobody would have anything nice to say about you, though," Clara told her. Oswin glared and Clara smiled and leant on the wall with her shoulder. "Really, though, you're alright with coming today?"

"I wouldn't do them the injustice of not attending their funeral, Clars," Oswin said seriously. "And I'm fine, when Mr Popular over there isn't glued to his phone screen." She knocked Adam on the leg with her cane, making him look up. Rose and Mattie – Ten lingering behind his wife – were the last few lingering in the doorway of the church, and Tish, who remained seated on the front row, waiting. Jack was off chin-wagging with the old members of Torchwood. How long until they all migrated to the location of the wake? Adam had volunteered to drive them all in some other car of his, after reclaiming his Omnio prototype some days previously.

"Sorry, sorry…" he mumbled, "I'll put it back on do not disturb…"

"He's in a PR war with Prometheus," Oswin explained.

"Isn't Prometheus a drug company?" Clara asked him, "What do they want with you?"

"I don't know – their CEO takes an issue with me."

"Is he the one with the stupid name?"

"Will Smiles. Well, William Smilson, but he always wants everyone to call him 'Will Smiles' – ' _because that's what he does!_ '" Adam mimicked the obnoxious Prometheus sound-bite that was played at the end of every interview Smiles did – which was a lot, now that Clara thought about it; he was always all over the TV. "Forget about it, it's not important. He's just making up lies, anyway… funeral limbo like this is always awkward…"

"You think everything's awkward, babe," Oswin said as he put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders a little, like he didn't want anybody to see him. Then Oswin lowered her voice to address Clara, "How is Matts doing, by the way? Is she okay?" Clara wasn't sure how to answer.

"We're supposed to be taking her to get the rest of her stuff from her house tomorrow," she said.

"What's happening with the house?" Adam asked.

"It's left to Mattie, but she can't do anything with it until she turns sixty in short-years. Eighteen in long-years. So it's just going to be sort of… sitting there," Clara said, "Do you know that house is the old groundskeeper cottage built where there was once a _super_ haunted mansion?"

"No, but that sounds like your wet dream, frankly," Oswin quipped, "What're they still doing in there?" Clara glanced back over her shoulder at Mattie, Rose, Ten, and Tish.

"They're waiting for the coffins to be taken away for cremation," Clara explained.

"I can't tell if Martha wanting to be cremated is ironic or incredibly fitting…"

"Both, maybe." Mattie shook and clung onto Rose, silent on the other side of the chapel's glass door, as the morticians came to remove the coffins. The Doctor still occupied with Jenny for the time being, presumably discussing her renovation schemes she'd been talking Clara's ear off about whenever Clara deigned to listen, Jack came meandering over. Perhaps to investigate how long it would be until the chapel was emptied for the next funeral, so that he could stat shepherding people in the direction of the wake venue.

"What a mundane funeral for two of the least mundane people this universe has ever seen," he said, sounding almost disappointed, but then changed his tone slightly, "It's quaint, I suppose."

"Not sure they would've appreciated the big parade Mitchell offered to fund," Oswin remarked.

"I didn't…" Adam mumbled, "I mean, I would've, if – but they didn't… um…" Clara could see why Smiles was able to give him the run-around in the media – for a boy-genius he had always been pitifully inarticulate.

"Nice eulogy," said Clara to Jack, "Liked how vague it was."

"Bit like your poetry."

"Very funny."

"Thanks. You know about the ashes, don't you?"

She frowned, "How do you mean?"

"I gave the funeral director your address for them," he explained, "No point sending them to Mattie's house."

"Oh, right… well, yeah, that's probably for the best… it's school holidays, so we'll be in… were there any instructions for them? Like, do we need to take Mattie to scatter them somewhere?" But at this moment the doors re-opened and out walked the trio of the most fragile mourners of all, though Tish was fairly distanced from even her own niece.

"I'll come and grab you later; Ianto's got a rental to drive them in, I said I'd do it," he motioned to Mattie and Rose, and then quickly left Clara and her ilk to go take care of that.

"How many seats are there in your car, then?" Clara turned to Adam.

"Uh… I'm only driving us three, and the Doctor. Esther's taking Jenny and Nios. Everyone else has other arrangements, I guess. Do you want to get going? I don't suppose there's much point hanging around here; everyone's going to be at the wake anyway."

"Yeah, you go on ahead, I'll grab whatshername," Clara said, referring to her wife. Adam and Oswin did just that, him helping her to walk away towards the nearby carpark. Other people were dispersing as well. Thirteen was talking to Jenny quite animatedly, which looked a bit off considering their surroundings.

"…see, if I make the study, y'know, transdimensional, it could be a totally cool thing, and-"

"Is this good funeral talk, do you think?" Clara interjected, touching her arm.

"Uh…" the Doctor faltered, "I was just telling Jenny about my ideas for that extra room, instead of just filling it with all the boxes we've moved out of the loft." Rose had been a big help in clearing out the contents of their loft over the last few days, ramming the all into the spare room.

"Well, tell her about it later, Adam's waiting to drive us to the wake. There'll be sandwiches. He says Esther's driving you and Ni," Clara reminded Jenny, who nodded like this was new information.

"Right. I'll go find them…" Jenny disappeared while Clara tugged on the Doctor's elbow to follow in Adam and Oswin's tracks.

"What about Matts?"

"Jack's driving her," Clara said, "Also, uh, he says the ashes are getting delivered to _us_."

"What, really? How long does that take?"

"Took a week for me to get dad's ashes," Clara said, "Probably a similar time. He said he'd fill me in on the rest of the details at the wake…"

"I'm not convinced by his ability to fill in any details, after the world's vaguest eulogy."

"Mmm, I told him the same thing."

"Should've got you to write it."

"Definitely shouldn't've. Maybe the Tenth Doctor…"

"Are you kidding me?" Thirteen asked as she opened the back door into Adam's car, he and Oswin already in the front. "The guy could barely even get through his own wedding vows. He's worse than Mitchell."

"Who's worse than me?" Adam asked, overhearing once the door was opened. Clara didn't answer him.

"I don't think he's quite _that_ bad…"

"At least Adam didn't hesitate halfway through saying 'I do,'" Thirteen continued.

"No, I'll give him that," said Oswin, "I definitely hesitated, though. Wish I'd listened to those initial doubts… biggest mistake of my afterlife, when you think about it."

"Feeling's mutual," said Adam, starting his car. Oswin fake-gasped. Clara and the Doctor fastened their seatbelts.

"Heartbreak! And on such a sad day, too…"

"Who were you talking about, though?" Adam persisted as he started the car. Like Clara, he too preferred to actually drive rather than let the automated system do it all. She'd never been a huge fan of autopiloting cars everywhere, despite the fact they were proven to be incredibly safe (a lot safer than letting humans drive the cars.) She supposed they were both just old-fashioned.

"Ten," Clara explained, "I was saying maybe they should have had him do the eulogy instead of Jack."

"Jack just played it safe," Oswin said, "What do you want him to do? Talk in graphic detail about how they confessed their feelings to each other in a sewer while hunting an alien worm parasite that killed people by crawling into their arseholes and then ripping out of them?"

"Well… no, obviously not," Clara said, feeling queasy after being reminded of _that_ old story.

"It's a eulogy, not a biography. Not a 'complete history of Mickey and Martha.' I think he was fine. What did you want him to do? Read out one of your poems?"

"Considering my poems are predominantly about lesbian sex, I don't think they'd really fit with the tone," Clara said dryly.

"I hear you two are renovating?" Adam changed the subject as he followed the directions to the wake venue, which was a local pub as far as Clara could remember; they didn't really have access to a house to host it at, not unless Sally Sparrow wanted to volunteer her family home in Westminster. But it would be too much of a hassle trying to get the whole funeral party through the London traffic, not to mention that the house was overrun with junk as far as Clara could recall; the overflowing vampire archive and all of Esther's Lightning Girl paraphernalia.

"I'm making our spare room transdimensional," the Doctor announced.

"Haven't you been banging on about doing that for months?" Oswin quipped.

" _Yeah_ , but _somebody's_ only just let me."

"Well, we didn't need the space before," Clara said defensively, "It would have been unnecessary when we had the loft, but now the loft has to be emptied. I'm still not convinced about what you plan on putting in there."

"Is Mattie gonna be okay in the loft?" Adam asked.

"I think it's better she goes up there than we do," Clara said, "And doubly better than giving her the spare room when it's still small. Loft's big, after all, and she needs her privacy. And, you know, so do we…"

"You're utterly filthy, I hope you know that," said Oswin. Clara, sitting behind her, kicked the back of her seat, but for once Oswin didn't react in the childish way she usually would. The gloom of the funeral and their circumstances was still hovering, heavy and pungent, in the air. "Tell you what's funny, Clars; both of our childhood bedrooms were in attics, too."

"Mm, well, we're not planning on keeping Matilda a prisoner up there, so I doubt this is remotely similar to your childhood."

"I also like to think we'd notice if she started dating an extra person who lived with us for four years," said the Doctor, "Which your relatives seemed to be utterly incapable of."

"Flek and I were very discreet, that's all," said Oswin, "Not that _you_ know the definition of 'discretion.' Either of you."

"Anyway," Clara ignored her, "It's a nice loft. It's got a skylight. And I really hope she'll be okay there…"

"We all want her to be okay," Adam assured her. It was only Oswin who seemed to have the heart of stone at times like this, which was due to nothing more than her masterful ability to save face; Clara had been on the receiving end of a handful of teary phone calls from her twin over the last few nights.

"I just worry about her today," Clara confessed, "The funeral is the hardest part."

"Well, the worst bit's over," the Doctor said, "What can be worse than having to watch those coffins leave?"

"Being bombarded by questions about how she's feeling by distant relatives, I'll bet. That's the bit _I_ hate, after all."

"Are you going to send her to school?" Oswin asked. The Doctor and Clara both paused and glanced at one another uncertainly.

"Uh…" began Clara, "We, erm… we haven't brought it up with Mattie yet…"

"Better talk about it soon," Oswin advised, "Let her get used to the idea, if you do decide to send her. Don't want to spring it on her too close to the time."

"Well, it's only July," Thirteen said, "Oughta wait until she settles in with us first."

"School would probably be good for her," said Adam, switching on the indicator and turning into a carpark around the back of a pub slowly filling up with the funeral party. "She should really socialise with other teenagers… she is _still_ in adolescence, like, emotionally, after all."

"Can you imagine how awful it must be to go through puberty for, like, thirty years?" Oswin mused. "I wasn't even alive for thirty years."

"Rain's getting worse…" Clara said, peering out of the window as Adam parked. It had only been a fine drizzle, but now it was increasing; the weather forecast said there was going to be a bad thunderstorm by the evening. They'd forgotten to bring an umbrella.

It was left to Adam to help Oswin out of the car, though Clara waited nearby in case she was needed (as usual). The Doctor grew antsy next to her, presumably dying to get something to eat from the wake spread without wanting to sound insensitive and mention how hungry she was. Clara, too, was very interested to see what food there was – egg sandwiches, she hoped. The old Torchwood lot had arrived first, then the four of them, and quickly behind came a few cars carrying Mattie's blood relatives. Rather than wait for Matilda herself, Clara deigned to follow the Doctor into the empty pub, where Anwen Williams was part-way through unwrapping the clingfilm from the trays of food laid out while her parents went to sit down. A myriad of quartered sandwiches, as predicted, and other things you'd only ever eat at a funeral or a picnic. Scotch eggs, sausage rolls, spring rolls, brownies on the end, and two large flasks labelled 'tea' and 'coffee.'

"D'you think the bar's open?" Clara asked, joining her in perusing the sandwiches.

"Maybe," said Anwen, to whom she had never actually said a single word to before.

"I'll have a cider," said Rhys.

"We don't know if the bar's open," Anwen told him.

"I thought you just said it is?"

"No, we were saying _is_ the bar open." He was getting hard of hearing.

"It's 11am, Coo, and you're gonna start drinking?" the Doctor questioned disapprovingly.

"I fancy some cider. I'm _sad_ , okay? Maybe I want a drink. It's not like I'm driving us home." Jenny was supposed to be taking them back in the TARDIS.

"So you're gonna get drunk."

"Not _drunk_ , just have some Bulmers, or – look, forget about it, I'll have some tea," Clara lied. If the bar _was_ open, she was immediately going to try and procure something at least mildly alcoholic.

It was only a short while later that they were seated and slowly eating their way through the cold buffet, and Clara had already had to prevent the Doctor once from going back for seconds too soon. Not that that sentiment prevented Jenny from collecting an almighty heaping of food and then wandering over their way to comment on the absence of the Gutkeleds.

"Are they just not coming?" Adam asked.

"You know, um… I'm not sure…"

"You're kidding, right? They might skip the funeral _and_ the wake?"

"No – it's just that it's early, you know? They don't even usually get up until mid-afternoon. And if the weather forecast is right…"

"You could just take the TARDIS to go get them?" the Doctor suggested.

"I… don't know… maybe they just won't… Sally doesn't like to think about death or be reminded of it. And we're supposed to be being at least a _little_ discreet, it's bad enough having you two next to each other," she indicated Clara and Oswin, "You know what – I'll call them. I'll see what's going on…" And so Jenny took herself and her plate of pastries out of the front door of the pub. Clara herself couldn't say she was _that_ interested in whether the Gutkeleds _did_ show up, but thought it would be rude of them if they didn't (and she'd never known Sally Sparrow to turn down free food.)

An unnatural silence fell through the pub when Matilda finally arrived shortly thereafter, still with Rose attempting to comfort her and keep her company. This was the exact thing Clara had been worried about her having to go through, nobody giving her any room. But was looking away awkwardly even more uncomfortable than watching her outwardly? Jack followed them in last of all and saw it his duty to try and improve the mood.

Quite loudly, he said, "How about I see if I can't get this bar serving?" much to Clara's enjoyment. There were murmurs of approval for this suggestion, possibly not quite as enthusiastic as Jack had been hoping for, but enough for him to go get the attention of the staff on duty. No doubt he'd be able to smooth-talk his way to some liquor. After Jack made that announcement, Mattie slipped away with Rose and Ten to a corner, and Clara became occupied by Esther pulling a stool over to their table.

"To what do we owe the pleasure?" Clara joked, letting her attention wane from the rest of the funeral party. For some reason, River and Nios were in conversation in the corner, and Clara wondered what those two could possibly have to talk about.

"Have you seen the news?" Esther asked Adam.

"You mean the thing with Prometheus?"

"Yeah! That jerk wants to implement counter-measures for the Lightning Girl!" Esther complained.

"Probably because 'Lightning Girl' is such a boring name," Oswin said, "Maybe if she had a cooler name. Like 'the Bolt.' Why isn't she called the Bolt?"

"Guess you'll have to ask her vampire roommate who came up with all the obnoxious nicknames to begin with," Esther muttered.

"The Blue Bolt would be even better."

"Too little too late. Seriously, though. _Counter-measures_."

"It's like when Lex Luthor got his hands on Kryptonite," Oswin said.

"Well, yeah! It's just like that! Superman's not gonna hurt anybody, and neither am – I mean, neither _is_ the Lightning Girl…"

"I don't know," said Clara, leaning both her hands on the table so that her sprawling electrical scar running the length of her left arm was plainly visible and in Esther's line of sight, "I might beg to differ."

Esther grimaced, "You're a jerk too."

Jack clapped his hands, "Bar's open!"

"Great," Clara said, making to climb over her wife so she could get to the booze.

"Hey," the Doctor stopped her.

"I just want to-"

"But you said-"

"Just-"

"I was just looking around for you," now Jack came over, also joining them at Esther's side, while Esther lowered her voice to continue moaning about Prometheus with Adam. Oswin was stuck like a gooseberry in the middle of them all, involved in neither conversation. "I believe you were asking me about the ashes?"

"…Right," said Clara, trying to remember exactly where they'd left off. She was distracted by the sound of the rain increasing outside, lashing against the windows.

"There aren't any instructions about scattering them," Jack explained.

"What, _none_?" asked Thirteen, "What're we supposed to do with them, then?"

"I guess that's up to Mattie. Maybe she'll want to keep them. God knows, Jenny's been carrying that one guy's urn around for 250 years and they only knew each other for half a day."

"Jenny's a weirdo, though," Oswin pointed out.

"That's my daughter," Thirteen scolded her.

"And _you're a_ weirdo, too."

"Gee, thanks."

"Look, they're not being delivered for a week," Jack resumed, "Once they arrive, ask Mattie what she wants to do with them, I wouldn't bring it up beforehand. Although, my best guess is that she _will_ want to keep them, so maybe you two should get used to the idea of having them around in your house."

"I'm sure we have much spookier things hidden in our house," Clara sighed. "Now, um, I really need a drink, so if you'll excuse me…" To the Doctor's annoyance, Clara just phased through her so that she could escape the confines of their corner table (where she'd been semi-trapped against the wall) and join the small group of people milling about by the bar, waiting to order drinks

Rose appeared at her shoulder. She'd stropped crying, but her eyes were still surrounded by red, inflamed circles.

"Could you, uh…" Rose began, "Could you buy me a drink? Please?" Clara raised her eyebrows at her. "I don't have any money, and I don't understand how you use phones to pay for everything these days."

"It's not that complicated," said Clara.

"Doesn't anybody use money anymore?"

"Cash? Nope. They barely even print it. But sure. What do you want?"

"What're you having?"

"Whatever cider they've got on tap. Looks like Strongbow from here."

"I'll just have the same, then."

"How are you, uh, holding up, then?" Clara asked after a moment's pause.

"Don't know that I am holding up," Rose looked at her feet.

"Yeah…"

"You seem alright, though."

"Well, you know. Funerals are strange. I'm sure it'll hit me later tonight when I try to go to sleep. Right now I'm just dying for a smoke."

"I don't know why you don't quit."

"I keep quitting, but then things happen that mean I need them…"

"You don't _need_ them."

"Easy for you to say. I wish you non-smokers would show a bit more empathy sometimes."

"It's your choice, though. It's not like you were born that way."

"Funny," Clara quipped, "That's exactly what my god-awful aunt said when she found out I'm queer." She got to the bar and asked for two half-pints of cider, thinking that the Doctor certainly would not be happy if she came back with a full one – and because an entire pint was a bit much for that time of day. But funerals were like Christmas, in that you could spend the whole day drinking with nobody batting an eyelash. Thunder rumbled overhead. "'Scuse me," she caught the bartender's attention again, "Is there anywhere I can smoke?"

"You can try your luck in the beer garden," he said, laughing and glancing at the rain-streaked window, "But, uh… you might want to hold off."

"I'll be okay with the rain," she said, handing Rose her cider.

"Really?" Rose asked incredulously, "You're going out in this?"

"Fresh air would be nice…"

"Rain might wash off some of the stink."

"Ha, ha. I'll see you in a bit." Clara took off, taking her cider and making a beeline for the door outside.

The rain really _had_ picked up in the last twenty minutes, considerably. But luckily it was completely empty out in the secluded beer garden, so she could safely use her telekinesis to make an invisible umbrella to keep herself dry. Floating her glass next to her, she hastily lit a Marlboro and settled in to enjoy a few minutes all by herself.

But she wasn't alone for long. Her enjoyment of her cigarette and alcohol was interrupted when someone came bursting out of the pub door next to her, like they were desperately looking for an escape. She was surprised to see it was Mattie, who hadn't noticed her immediately.

"Matts?" Clara asked, making her jump. Mattie looked away. The door swung closed behind her.

"I thought it would be empty out here…"

"Sorry about that… are you-"

" _Don't_ ask me if I'm okay. I'm tired of everybody just asking me if I'm okay. It's stupid; of course I'm not, how could anyone be?" she complained. Clara fell silent, trying to work out what she _should_ say, if anything. But Matilda beat her to it. "Are you smoking _and_ drinking?"

"…I'm a terrible role model, what more can I say?" she half-joked. Mattie smiled slightly. "I always need alcohol to get through a funeral. They're unbearable _completely_ dry."

"Maybe you should buy me a pint, then."

"Buy your own."

"I don't look old enough."

"Then I suppose there's your answer." Mattie scowled.

"You can't talk about how great alcohol is and then just _not_ buy me any."

"Sweetheart, if I bought you alcohol to drink, your mother would come back from the dead and murder me. And if there's one person I'm scared of, it's Martha." Mattie rubbed her eye underneath her glasses, which were getting speckled with raindrops.

"Yeah. She probably would murder you."

"The look she used to give me whenever I used to ask her to light a fag for me… it'd turn your blood cold…" Mattie was still rubbing one of her eyes. "Don't do that, Matts. You'll irritate the skin."

"It's bothering me again," she complained. It was her lazy eye she'd had since she was a baby, that had never _quite_ let itself be corrected. Clara remembered her having to wear an eyepatch at one stage to unsuccessfully try and fix her squint.

"Well, rubbing it won't help," Clara told her sternly, "Give over." Mattie dropped her hands by her sides, then came to lean on the wall next to Clara.

"How are you not getting wet?"

"Telekinesis," she said, "Do you want me to do you?"

"No. I like the rain. Do you know what's going to happen to Mrs Ward?"

"Just a council funeral… it's, um… it's going to be an unmarked grave."

"It's _what_? That's not fair!" she protested, "Just because she lost everybody, now nobody will remember her at all? Won't even know where she is?"

"…You know what? I'll have Adam look into it. He'll be able to get her a proper headstone. He's got sway – much more than me, at any rate. And then we can visit, if you want. There's not really going to be a funeral…" Clara, who had stayed behind at Mrs Ward's house to wait for the emergency services to come, had bade a mortician who came to collect the body to keep in touch with her about what was happening. These were the most recent updates.

"Everyone should have a chance for people say goodbye to them. Say goodbye _properly_."

"Of course they should. Have you had anything to eat, though?"

"I'm not very hungry. I don't want to have to eat in there with all those people."

"They're your family."

"I know, but… it's too much."

"I can go get you something? Bring it out?" said Clara, who understood exactly what Mattie meant about it being 'too much.' But she wasn't sure anybody found wakes particularly enjoyable. Sure, she was a big fan of the tiny sandwiches and other snacks, but the atmosphere of death was still nauseating. "You didn't have any breakfast, either."

"I'm not hungry." Clara's cigarette burned down, so she dropped it in the mud and rain and stamped it out with her foot.

"What do you think of taxidermy?" Clara changed the subject, wanting to distract Mattie – at least for a little while.

"Taxidermy?"

"Yeah."

"It's kind of cool. Why?"

"Urgh."

"What?"

"Nothing… just, the Doctor's got this _hideous_ taxidermy bald eagle stashed away on the TARDIS, and now she wants to get it and put it in the new room she's upscaling. And I've had to put up with the ghastly thing in the console room for _decades_ , and just when I thought I didn't have to see it anymore…"

" _Why_ does she have a taxidermy eagle?"

"It was a gift, from Abraham Lincoln, because she helped him write the Emancipation Proclamation," Clara explained, "He gave her that and then invited us for a nice evening at the theatre, which we, uh, had to decline. For the exact same reason we didn't join Jack and Jackie on their trip to Dallas."

"Taxidermy's kind of cool. I wanted to learn how to do it, but dad wouldn't let me, he said it's too macabre."

"He has a good point."

"I _like_ macabre."

"We're all very aware of how much you like macabre, Mattie. After Martha threw out your collection of dead spiders." She'd almost finished her cider by that point, Mattie getting steadily soaked. "Are you sure you're alright with this weather?"

"It's calming."

"…Do you want to do something? Go somewhere else? Just a walk, I mean. Get away from here for a while. There's no shame in _not_ wanting to be surrounded by over-eager mourners." Mattie was about to respond, when Rose appeared at the door into the pub, opening it a little too hard and partially breaking off the handle.

"…Whoops. I'll just leave that…" she said, then turned to Mattie, "So _this_ is where you've got to… and are you still smoking?"

"I was actually just lecturing Matilda about the dangers of smoking," Clara lied. Mattie frowned.

"Not _really_."

"I can if you want?" Clara suggested.

"No thanks."

"Did you want something?" Clara asked Rose.

"Just looking for Matts."

"I'm going back inside, anyway," Matilda said.

"Are you sure?" Clara said.

"Yeah… I don't want to stay for long, though."

"That's fine. We don't have to."

"I just don't want to be rude and hide…"

"Try and eat something," Clara advised, though she didn't think Matilda would listen. She nodded meekly and then walked past Rose to go back inside. Probably for the best, Clara wasn't sure where they'd go if she _had_ wanted to go for a walk. Just wander around Peckham for a bit? It wasn't exactly scenic. While Mattie returned – bravely, Clara thought – to the wake, Rose lingered outside in the rain.

"Smoker's paradise out here," she said as the door closed.

"Mm, the rainstorm really adds to the ambience."

"How long do you think you'll stay here, then?"

"I don't know. Half an hour? See what the Doctor thinks." Rose nodded.

"I remembered something my mum said to me earlier," Rose began. Jackie Tyler had died a long time ago, just like all their parents.

"Oh?"

"It was the day we got trapped in the parallel universe, when the Doctor and I arrived that morning… she told me that in fifty years' time, I'd have become a stranger. I wouldn't have any reason to come back to Earth once she's dead, and I wouldn't be Rose Tyler anymore… and now look. Still coming back, right back to Peckham… Powell Estate's only a ten-minute walk from here, where me and Mickey both grew up. This is the same pub where he used to go to watch the football, every Sunday. Used to make me go, too, until I complained enough," she reminisced fondly. "Laundrette mum went to every time the washing machine packed in used to be just over the road. Suppose it's closed down now."

"You seem the same to me as you did when we first met," Clara said, "And it's still home, Earth. Not so easy to say goodbye to as the Doctor might make it seem sometimes. I went off to space too, but now I'm back here… she said something similar about me too, you know. About changing."

"How do you mean?"

"You remember when she went back in time?"

"How could I forget?"

"Well, when she came back, she told me she was surprised by how similar I was in the past to how I am now, that she almost thought that when she went back there she'd barely recognise me, that her influence would've changed me so much. And instead… we really _are_ frozen in time."

"Do you ever get the feeling that we're dying out?"

"I think we're just getting old. That's what happens. People start dying. Funny how we took it for granted during the Dimension Crash… could you imagine if we were back there now? Able to just knock on the next door and see Martha? Mickey? The Ponds?"

"Your husband?"

"Maybe…"

"You don't really want to go back there."

"Do you think?"

"Imagine the washing up we'd have to do. And _constantly_ having to buy milk, the eternal milk run."

Clara laughed, "Yeah, I suppose… you know, Rose, you can come to Brighton whenever you want to see Matilda. Like, really. Any time."

"The Doctor said the same thing."

"Well, we mean it. Like you said, it feels like we're dying out. We should try and stick together, even if we _don't_ all live in the same place anymore."

"Another reason mum was wrong; I _do_ have a reason to keep coming back to Earth. I've never failed to visit Matilda, and I'm not gonna fail now."

"I'm sure she'll love to see you, and so will the Doctor and I. We don't get many guests."

"Hey, I'm… I'm sorry about having a go at you the other day, when you came all that way to rescue us. And for not trusting that you'd be able to look out for Mattie."

"It's fine. I like to think you would have come to rescue me."

"Only out of a sense of obligation."

"I'd expect nothing less."

"…Do you think she'll be okay?"

"I hope so."

"Do you think _we'll_ be okay?"

"When have any of us ever been okay? And without Martha to fix us all up? We should be placing bets on how long it takes for Jenny to be irreparably damaged."

"A few hours, probably."

"Can I ask you something personal? Only a bit personal. I think."

"Go ahead," said Clara, who couldn't really think of any question she'd refuse to answer Rose about. Especially since Rose could see into the time vortex and find out all the answers if she wanted.

"Why _did_ you move back to Earth?"

"Well… being on the TARDIS for that long felt like I missed out on having the life I always wanted. Being a teacher, and stuff. It just got maddening after a while. And honestly, it wasn't hard at all to convince the Doctor to leave, especially not when I brought this up to her right after we'd been apart for weeks and she was missing me so much. Anyway, it's good we have an actual home where Mattie can stay, otherwise where would she go? To stay with her cousins who don't even understand what she is? Why she ages three times slowly?

"At the end of the day, though, Earth's _home_. The Doctor doesn't have a home for her to go back to anymore, she's only got me and the TARDIS. And you know what Judy Garland says; there's no place like home."

"I suppose that'll always be true, there really _is_ no place like home…"


	13. Invasive Species - Chapter 1

_Invasive Species_

 _1_

"Are you _sure_ you want to go out tonight?" the Doctor asked wryly, wrapping her arms around Clara's waist from behind. Clara was leaning down towards the mirror of their dressing table trying to apply mascara, which was not easy when there was a grown woman attached to her like a limpet. The Doctor kissed her cheek, then rested her chin on Clara's shoulder and met her eyes in the reflection. "The weather forecast says it's going to be cold."

"Going out tonight was _your_ idea," Clara reminded her, "You expressly told me we have to go out and see this 'once in a lifetime' thing. Though, given the contexts of, like, our entire lives, I do question what 'once in a lifetime' means to you."

"Yeah, I _know_ that, _but_ … maybe we should be doing some _other_ 'once in a lifetime' thing…"

"Mm, and when you say that, you presumably mean sex, which is the exact opposite of 'once in a lifetime', it's rarely even once in a day," Clara told her, trying to get even closer to the mirror, "Could you stay still? I'm concentrating." The Doctor did make the effort to stay still, though she didn't relinquish Clara.

"All I'm saying is it's literally our _last night of freedom_. Before we're shackled to the daily grind of capitalist hegemony, trapped longingly on opposite sides of a metaphorical prison."

"We're just going back to school, sweetheart," Clara dismissed her, "It's not the end of the world. If you want us to schedule when we're going to-"

"No! We shouldn't have to schedule _anything_. It should be _spontaneous_. Off the cuff. And at every opportunity. You know what they say, Coo. _Carpe diem_."

"Sounds like you need to go away and have a very cold shower while I decide what colour lipstick to wear…" Clara said, fumbling about on their messy dressing table, where it was absolutely impossible to find anything. The Doctor was still clinging to her like a needy puppy.

"I can't have a shower now, I've already done my hair," she said.

"And we both know how long _that_ took you…"

"But does my hair look great, or does my hair look great?"

"Hmm…" Clara feigned confusion as she searched the dressing table.

"Wait, does it not look great?" she was instantly worried. Clara didn't answer, it took all of her attention to try and find something in their bedroom. "Coo? …Clara? Does it not look great? … _Clara_."

"Oh my god, be quiet. You're fine. What colour lipstick do you think?"

"I don't care, it's going to be dark anyway – just 'fine'? You think my hair is _fine_?"

"If it's 'going to be dark anyway' why do you care about your hair?" Clara said, deciding on a colour without her wife's opinion. The first one she could find that wasn't basically finished, as it happened.

"That's not the point."

"Then why did you say it about my lipstick?"

"Where's the hairspray?" she let go of Clara and started searching around on the dressing table, "Urgh! I can't find anything in here! What's wrong with us? Why are we so gross?" Clara glanced around at the room and realised the Doctor was right, it was terribly messy. Every surface that could be covered in clothes _was_ covered in clothes, clothes and tissues and dust and so many old, empty beauty products it was a wonder they ever knew which things they needed to buy more of. "It's such a cliché," Thirteen began, finding the hairspray and touching up her hair in the mirror; Clara worried about the flammability of the Doctor's head. "People say that boys are the messy ones and girls are clean, but it's a lie. There's two of us and look at all this."

"Tell you what's cliché – you going mental about your bloody hair…" Clara muttered, mostly to herself. And then the worst happened. While fumbling about trying to perfect her hair, the Doctor knocked Clara's arm with her elbow while Clara was trying to put her lipstick on. It streaked off across the side of her face and she gawked. "You absolute…"

"Huh? _Oh_ …" Thirteen realised what she had done as Clara glared at her. And then, not understanding the enormity of the situation, she laughed. "You kinda look like a clown."

"A _clown_!?" Clara exclaimed. Then she reached over and aggressively tousled the Doctor's hair, which was like straw because of all the hairspray, and messed it up as best she could.

"Clara! Why did you do that!?"

"You messed up my lipstick!"

"By _accident_! This is _my hair_!"

"Get over yourself."

" _Get over myself_!?"

"Yes! This is my lipstick, I look stupid now, but _you_ …"

"What? What about me?"

"You're gorgeous no matter _how_ much time you spend on your hair." For a second, Thirteen just stood there huffily, Clara satisfied in her lack of snappy response that she had won this time. And then, without any shred of warning, the Doctor was kissing her, and she didn't care at all who'd won what argument. She barely cared about the fact they were supposed to be going out, and began to think with what little brain power she had left that maybe the Doctor's proposition that they forget all about their plans and just spend the entire evening in bed, skipping dinner, was a phenomenally brilliant idea, and her wife was a bona fide genius.

If they'd been living on their own, they probably would have forgotten about what they were meant to be doing, but annoyingly enough they no longer had the privilege. They had returned to a world filled with rude interruptions from people they happened to live with – one person, in fact: Matilda Smith-Jones.

She knocked loudly on their bedroom door. Or maybe she kicked it.

"We're gonna miss it!"

"No, we're not," Clara called back firmly, pushing the Doctor away from her, though the Doctor just laughed and kept trying to tease her, "I'm just sorting out my lipstick, we'll only be a minute." The Doctor tried to kiss her again, "No, _no_. Leave me alone. Go hose yourself down and put some shoes on."

" _Urgh_ , fine. Be boring."

"You act like we're going to be out all night – we'll literally be back by about ten. Or earlier. Calm down, and stop bothering me while I find the makeup wipes…"

"So that's what am to you now? Just a bother? An annoyance?"

"At this exact moment, yes," said Clara. The Doctor scoffed.

"Well it's nice to know you care."

"Likewise. Now, please, go away. I'll see you in a minute."

"Unbelievable…" the Doctor grumbled, shaking her head and finally braving the mess of their carpet to get to the bedroom door, tiptoeing around all the junk strewn about. She couldn't rightly remember the last time they'd actually properly cleaned their room… they'd both gotten much too cosy having the TARDIS around to pick up after them for so long. Matilda was sitting on the thin flight of stairs leading up to the attic, already dressed and ready to go see the meteor shower the Doctor had been obsessing about for the last week or so. "She's just gotta fix her face. She's _hideous_ ," Thirteen called back loudly into her bedroom.

"Leave me alone!" Clara shouted, slamming the door on her telekinetically.

The Doctor scoffed and shook her head, " _Women_. You want my advice? Don't marry a woman."

"I don't have any intention of marrying a woman."

"Good," the Doctor nodded, "As long as I've taught you something. Really, though, I'm sure she won't be long. She hates being late to things… Anyway!" She changed her whole tone, "I've gotta feed Captain Nemo, do you wanna help? I've already taught you all I know about women, so next up, lobsters."

"I'm not sure you've really taught me anything substantial about women," said Matilda, following the Doctor downstairs, "So I dread to think what you've got to say about lobsters. 'Don't marry a lobster'?"

"Well, personally, I wouldn't marry a lobster."

"But you did marry a woman. So you don't take your own advice. So maybe I _should_ marry a lobster, is that what you're saying?" Mattie persisted. "If I should just, do the opposite of you?"

"How are you feeling about tomorrow?" the Doctor changed the subject completely as she jumped down the rest of the stairs back into the living room with Mattie at her heals. "You sure you don't wanna stay in and mentally prepare yourself for the toils of a western education system?"

"No, I want to see the meteor shower, now you've hyped it up so much."

"Yeah, but, if you don't want to go-"

"Don't try to make this about me," Mattie said, "You should've thought about how much you want to stay in and screw Clara before you got everybody excited about the meteors."

" _That_ is _not_ appropriate," the Doctor said indignantly, "You're too young to make jokes like that."

"I'm fifty. And it's true. I know it's true because I heard what you were talking about in your room just now."

"You shouldn't eavesdrop on married couples. Don't make me… ground you, or something," the Doctor warned, unsure about what, exactly, grounding Matilda would consist of. Matilda wasn't in the habit of going out anywhere and didn't yet have any friends in Brighton, so the threat of being grounded was worth practically nothing.

The Doctor just decided to drop the whole thing in favour of turning her attention to Captain Nemo, the _other_ member of a technically inferior species she had to take care of. Only, Captain Nemo didn't answer back. He was halfway through a meaningful expedition from one end of his fifty-gallon tank to the other. "How're you doing, buddy? Oh, gosh… chopped Squidward's head off again – you've been a busy little menace, haven't you? Gonna have to glue that back on the next time I break out the chainmail gloves." The little plastic fish tank ornament of Squidward sat in two halves like the wreckage of the _Titanic_. The lobster didn't do anything in response to her looming next to the glass, just wandered around with his beady, black eyes. "I saved him from a restaurant, you know. How about some bloodworms for you?" She picked up the can of freeze-dried bloodworms on the shelf above the tank and carefully opened the lid.

"Why is he called _Captain_ Nemo and not just 'Nemo'?" Matilda asked.

"He's not named after the movie, he's named after the character in _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_. Clara insisted she name him if we were keeping him, has to be a literary reference because she's pretentious like that," Thirteen rolled her eyes at this anecdote fondly, "I wanted to give him a cool name. Like King Prawn. Or Sir Kill-a-Lot, like _Robot Wars_. Or Clawmancer."

"I like Clawmancer," said Matilda.

"Thank you! Anyway, Captain Nemo's the guy who built and operates the _Nautilus_ , the advanced submarine. I think we've got a copy of it somewhere, but it's in French," she explained as she shook the dry bloodworms into the tank. They slowly sank, and Captain Nemo became active for once, going after his food. "Gotta keep an eye on him, he's a little Houdini. Do you know that a lobster with one claw missing is called a cull, and with both claws missing is called a bullet?"

"How do they lose their claws? Do they get, like, prosthetic claws?"

"No, they grow them back, like lizards, or Deadpool. Or my wife." Captain Nemo waddled in the general direction of the bloodworms as the Doctor finished with the tub and put it back on the shelf, taking extra care to make sure she closed the tank properly. Suffice it to say, Captain Nemo had a bit of a track record as the most notorious escapologist of the lobster world – so she had to double check the lid was well-fastened. She sighed and looked at the ornaments again. "Poor Squidward. Now who's going to take the orders at the Krusty Krab?" The little decorative Krusty Krab sat in the corner of the tank collecting algae. "Scooby-Doo might have to do it." Scooby-Doo had also been maimed on multiple occasions by the lobster. There was also a blue police box gathering green stuff in the corner, one which she had made herself, out of clay, and painted, as well as a crashed submarine. She loved buying new ornaments for the fish tank.

"Why don't you have pirate ship?" Mattie asked, "You should get a pirate ship and then cover it in glow-in-the-dark paint, so it looks like a ghost ship. Do ghost ships actually exist?"

"What an excellent idea and an even more excellent question you should ask my better half when she comes downstairs. She's the expert, and though I _could_ answer you right here right now, I'd hate to steal her thunder."

"What about the Bermuda Triangle?"

"What about it?"

"Does it pull ships down?"

"It's a big, crashed spaceship under the sea, full of Cybermen," the Doctor said, "Oswin went there, she helped them gain sentience, they were abducting ships and planes from the surface in order to fix theirs. These scavengers were manipulating them into being slaves and eventually Oswin managed to give them autonomy on Nios's advice. It's an ethically complex situation, but I suppose they haven't tried to take over the world, so we oughtn't begrudge them the opportunity to create their own robo-communist underwater utopia."

"Sounds cool. How long's Clara gonna be?" Mattie bounced up and down on her heels agitatedly, not wanting to be late to witness the 'event of the century', as the Doctor had described it.

"She had a mishap and got a big streak of lipstick across her face she needs to fix. Shouldn't be _too_ long…" As luck would have it, the sound of footsteps from on high punctuated the end of the Doctor's sentence, as Clara finally quit their bedroom to join them downstairs. "Speak of the devil, and the devil shall appear."

"As long as we don't miss the meteor shower."

"We won't miss it, I promise."

"What are you promising now?" Clara asked when she appeared on the stairs, jumping down them.

"That we'll see the meteors in time, so hurry up."

" _Me_? You were the one distracting me earlier," said Clara loudly from the hallway, then she came into the living room carrying a pair of boots to put on.

"I was doing no such thing," said the Doctor.

"You still don't have any shoes on," Clara pointed out.

"I'm in mourning."

"Of who?"

"Squidward's dead."

"Oh, really?" Clara looked up at her then pouted, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, thanks. I'm coping. It's gonna be difficult."

"Are you going to glue his head back on or shall we bury him in a matchbox in the rose bed and have a little funeral?" Clara asked, "Like you made us do for that butterfly you accidentally stepped on?"

"I'm still sad about that, Clara – why did you have to bring it back up?"

" _Put your shoes on_."

"Oh my _god_ , it's like living with a _dictator_ ," she complained, glancing around the room to find where she had thrown whatever pair of Converse she had worn last. The ones with the stars and stripes on them, of course, the ones which annoyed Clara most of all.

"Yes, I'm sure it's exactly like that." Matilda was looking at the lobster tank and Captain Nemo eating his bloodworms, and Squidward's decorative corpse lying in the algae-covered gravel at the bottom of the tank.

"Could an octopus survive being decapitated?" she asked.

"Squidward is a squid, sweetheart," Clara said absently, distracted because the zip on the side of her boot was stuck.

"He's an octopus, he has eight arms and no tentacles. Squid have eight arms and two tentacles," said Matilda.

"Is there a difference?"

"How do you get an MA in occult mythology and write a paper on krakens and you don't know the anatomical nuances which separate squid and octopuses?" Thirteen questioned while she did her laces, "Tentacles are way longer than arms. And they have thingies on the ends."

"Thingies?"

"Don't they have thingies, Matts?"

"They're called clubs," said Matilda.

"See, Clara? They're called clubs," said the Doctor. Clara frowned at Matilda.

"How do you know that?"

"A lot of my education comes from Wikipedia. But could an octopus survive being decapitated?"

"If he's an octopus, why is he called 'Squidward Tentacles'?" Clara persisted.

"If Spongebob is a sponge why does he have a brain and speak English and make burgers in a fast food restaurant?" Thirteen challenged, "Your logic is inherently flawed. And also, I think they probably would die if you cut their head off. Even I would die if someone cut my head off. No regeneration for that."

" _What_!?" she exclaimed, "Nobody ever told me that! That's something I should know. I'll have to be extra-careful not to get my head cut off."

"Were you not doing that already?" Clara asked.

"Not with any commitment. This ruins my plans."

"What plans…?"

"To get myself decapitated. To see what it feels like, because nobody knows. If I want to study injuries-"

"Surgery and studying injuries isn't the same thing," said Clara, "If you tell people you want to study injuries, they're going to think you're the one inflicting the injuries."

"But I would be. I'd be the one cutting people open and sticking stuff inside them. Are you sure I can't cut my head off?"

"I think Martha would not be happy with us if we let you cut your head off, okay?" said Thirteen, finishing fixing her shoes, which were in covered in spots of mud and desperately needed cleaning. Maybe she would clean the lobster tank and her shoes all in one day, block out a good few hours for cleaning.

"What about Esther?" she questioned as the Doctor stood up.

"I don't think Esther would very much enjoy it if you cut her head off," Thirteen advised, "Although, hypothetically, since she decomposed in a grave for four years, she probably sustained a similar amount of damage-"

"Right!?" exclaimed Matilda, "If she could regrow a whole jaw _and_ skin and fingernails and all of her mushy, internal organs repaired themselves, maybe she could, like, be the answer to all of my problems. You know? Are you ready to go yet? See the meteors? Also, does anyone have any pictures of Esther when she was undead?"

"She still is undead, she's just cute so you can't tell," said Clara, also standing up after _finally_ fixing the zip on her boots. "Not to mention she wears that ridiculous costume half the time…" She then added, offhand, to the Doctor, "Did you get the stuff for s'mores out of the kitchen?" The Doctor disappeared away to retrieve the items – biscuits, marshmallows, the works. "Don't ask Esther any invasive questions, she doesn't like talking about when she was dead and all her fingernails fell off. Ask her about how she's finally achieved her childhood dream of becoming a superhero instead, she'll talk your ear off about that." As she talked she dragged on her coat and picked up her house keys from the floor. "Matts, do you think we're messy?" she said, removing a handful of long, stray hairs from the keys and the carpet. When did they last hoover?

"Yeah," said Matilda. Clara was alarmed.

"Really? You know what – I give up."

"Give what up?" the Doctor asked her.

"The thing about the Roomba. I think we should get one." The Doctor had been trying to convince her to buy a Roomba for _months_ , but Clara had been very against it because she was old-fashioned. Or, the Doctor told her she was old-fashioned, wanting to do things for herself and not relying on machines (not that that had stopped them getting Helix installed in the house as their 'house AI', in order to blend in with everybody else in the future who all had computers helping them with every little thing.)

"What!? You're sure? So no more hoovering?" the Doctor asked, since she was the one who did the hoovering. She did the hoovering and all the cooking, Clara attended to the dishwasher and the laundry. Everything else they took turns with. It had become Mattie's responsibility to take the bins out over the last few, recent weeks, but that was her only chore. "This is a game-changer. I'm gonna have so much free time…"

"Uh-huh… have you fed the lobster?"

" _Yes_."

"I'm only checking," said Clara as she went to unlock the front door, dimly aware of Mattie hanging around behind her. The Doctor needed to check her hair in the mirror _one last time_ , during which Clara rolled her eyes and opened the door, letting in a gust of cold air.

"I can't wait until you have other people to boss around again, so you don't have to bother me," the Doctor complained, "And no smoking in the new van, you'll ruin the upholstery."

"And _I'm_ the bossy one," Clara quipped. "I'll have you know I'm quitting."

"Starting when?"

"Starting… tomorrow," said Clara, "Once we go back to school. I have to be a good role model. This isn't 1995 anymore where you can just smoke wherever you like."

"Were you smoking a lot in 1995?" Mattie asked.

"Well, I was seven, so I was on about forty a day," said Clara sarcastically, climbing into the driver's seat of the old VW camper van the Doctor had spent the entire summer refurbishing. It was now painted shiny, TARDIS blue with white, leather seats the Doctor thought were a bit _too_ loud – but she had given the Doctor permission to do whatever she liked as long as they got a working, road-legal vehicle at the end of it. She'd also had to strip out the engine and all the other machinery to comply with some legislation from the 2030s outright banning cars that didn't run on renewable energy; in the 2060s, _everything_ was electric. Its crowning glory, however – at least, in the Doctor's eyes – was that it could play cassettes and CDs. She also had a record player in the back, but had a real thing about cassettes at the moment. Clara had given up arguing with her wife about music a very long time ago, however, so she was resigned to her fate when the Doctor put on a decrepit Feeder tape and _My Perfect Day_ came crackling out (" _The crackling is part of the aesthetic_ ," she always said.) At least she'd been sensible enough to put in extra seats in the back; it wasn't quite optimised for actually _camping_ anywhere, and lacked any kind of bed, but Clara couldn't say she minded particularly. Not when they had a house as well.

"Are you really not allowed to smoke?" Matilda asked as she fastened her seatbelt.

"It's, uh… Lorna's advised against it. Ms Moore, I mean. The headmistress. Don't call her 'Lorna.' Because I'm a department head, there's even more pressure for me to be a good role model than there was before… I could get away with smoking before."

"Under the bus shelter, with the kids," the Doctor quipped.

"It's been illegal to smoke underneath bus shelters for a long time," Clara said.

"Where do the kids smoke, then?"

"Not that I've ever smoked with any teenagers," said Clara as she started the engine, "But they sneak through the broken fence at the bottom of the school field and lurk down there. Don't you remember? In March? There was that fire, from the stubs?"

"So, it's like, a dodgy school?" Matilda questioned from the backseat.

"No, it's just a normal school. It's just teenagers, sweetheart, they're always like that," Clara said, "No matter what kind of a façade they want to put on for Ofsted, teenagers are always going to be shits. And when you grow up, you'll learn that so are adults." She explained this as she reversed them out of the driveway, the sun just about to set above. It was nearing eight o'clock; the meteors were due in some forty minutes, after it was dark enough to see them.

"Ain't that the truth," said the Doctor.

"But don't tell anyone we said that. We're professionals."

"You're asking me to lie for you? An authority figure, asking a young, impressionable girl, to lie on her behalf?"

"Yes, precisely," said Clara, ignoring her bait. "You're not worried about if the school is rough, are you?"

"I don't know. What if I get in a fight? Or beaten up? That happens in schools, doesn't it?"

"Not nearly as often as the media would have you believe," said Clara.

"I used to get in fights at school," said the Doctor, " _Always_ in trouble, never listening. Never learnt how to regenerate properly, never learnt how to fly a TARDIS…"

"What she means," Clara began, "Is she's a terrible influence, and don't listen to anything she says. Or you'll end up like her."

"What do you mean, 'like me'?"

"Trapped in a dead-end job and a dead-end marriage."

"Oh, yeah. That's a good point, you don't wanna end up like me," the Doctor nodded, then stage-whispered to Matilda, "Between you and I, my drafted divorce papers are coming along swimmingly."

"You two are weird, you know," she told them, "Are you always this mean to each other, or is it just when you're around other people?"

"Always," they answered at the same time.

"Hey, Clara?"

"Mm?"

"Have you ever seen a ghost ship?"

"A real one or a fake one?"

"A… what do you mean?"

"Tell her about Blackbeard," the Doctor coaxed.

"Well it wasn't _actually_ Blackbeard, it was some actor," said Clara as she drove, "We saw a ship someone tried to trick us into thinking was a real ghost ship. It was really just covered in this glow-in-the-dark paint. I've never seen a proper ghost ship. Sally and Esther saw a ghost _train_ once, though, something to do with… different dimensions, I don't know. It was ages ago. Why do you ask?"

"It's just something I was saying about the fish tank," said Matilda, "Where does that come from? Like, ghost vehicles? Because… well, a person's got a brain and a consciousness, but objects don't. I mean, I know we saw a ghost _house_ , but… They don't have, like, souls, or… well, where does the superstition come from?"

"The 1700s."

"There's no ghost ships before then? But it's not like ships were just invented then. They had ships in Ancient Greece. Are there no Ancient Greek ghost ships?"

"Ancient Greek ghost ships? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any. But there's very little paraphernalia from Ancient Greece that survives," Clara explained, "Outside of pirated stuff the Doctor's copied from antique scrolls."

"Don't act like you didn't join in. We spent a whole weekend in Alexandria transcribing things from the library," the Doctor argued, "It was very romantic."

"When I say the 1700s, Matts, I don't mean the ships date to the 1700s, I mean the sightings do. I think what you've really got to think about when you're looking at this area of spectrality studies is the commercialisation of popular literature, right? We didn't even have an efficient way to print until the end of the medieval period, and it takes a few more centuries for everybody in the country to become basically literate. Do you know novels didn't even really exist until the 1700s? So suddenly you've got accessible stories that aren't just, like, poems or plays – bearing in mind not everybody has access to a theatre, no matter how cheap Shakespeare actually was – and people need something to write about.

"Or, alternatively, these stories have always existed and it's just that nobody thought to write them down extensively until our methods for written communication got more efficient. You've got to think that most of these sailors are going to be working class and probably illiterate, not interested in writing an account of what they've seen. And it's a dangerous job, maybe a lot of them who saw ghost ships died."

"Killed by the ghosts," said the Doctor, "I hear they can be vengeful."

"What ghosts are you talking about?"

"Hamlet's dad. Banquo. Caesar."

"Oh, sorry, I forgot that Shakespeare invented ghosts."

"Maybe he did, all this schtick you're giving us about the 1700s."

"Shakespeare wrote in the 1500s, which you know full well. And also, there are ghosts in the _Odyssey_ , which is vastly older than _Julius Caesar_. In fact, it's older than the actual Julius Caesar that _Julius Caesar_ is about. And in the _Divine Comedy_ , with Virgil. Maybe everyone just went collectively mental in the 18th Century and started imaging there are dead people everywhere."

"Y'know, Coo, I'm surprised you can't give her a more concise answer."

"First of all, I'm driving, so apologies if my attention lies elsewhere," she said, keeping very focused on the road in spite of all this as Mattie eavesdropped from the backseat, "Second of all, since I work in a purely academic context, when it comes to writing an actual thesis I have to stick to real, published work for my citations. I can't very well put, 'I have no actual evidence for this, but my wife has a time machine so I went back and asked a bunch of pirates if they'd ever seen a ghost, and one bloke told me he had seen a ghost, which is the crux of my following argument.'"

"Academia is severely limited in that regard, then," the Doctor muttered, "But if you wanna go look for ghost ships I'm more than willing to be your enabler. I'm a bad influence like that."

"…Maybe. One day."

"Can I come?" Mattie asked.

"Depends if we ever actually go."

"We will go," the Doctor assured Mattie, "Clara will have to fix her wounded reputation as the one, true ghostbuster of higher education."

"That's an atrocious thing to say," Clara told her, annoyed, "I weep. And I think we're here, anyway." They pulled up onto an expanse of grass just a little way outside of Brighton, a beach that wasn't very large and too far away from anything to be of interest to the tourists – but which was almost entirely deserted that evening. "You never know, Matts, look out at the sea long enough and you might see a ghost ship as well as some meteors."

"I went on a ship _with_ a lot of ghosts once," said Thirteen wistfully, getting out of the van and still carrying with her everything so that they could build a small fire on the beach and roast marshmallows, "It was the, uh… oh… y'know, the big one. The museum. Hotel California."

" _Queen Mary_?" Clara asked.

"That's the one. _Super_ haunted. Went a _very_ long time ago. They thought I was a hypnotist, or something… Anyway! Moving on! Time for space rocks and sugar! I. Am. Hyped. If there's one thing I can't get enough of, it's worthless calories." She left the door open and went off to find some sticks for them to burn, leaving Clara to lock up the van.

"Is it legal to start a fire on a beach?"

"It's fine, as long as we don't damage anything. I think. The kids who started that fire with their cigarette stubs didn't get charged with anything," Clara said, watching the Doctor wandering up and down the shore collecting driftwood. "Although, I'm not completely convinced that any of that wood will actually burn…" Speaking of burning, she remembered her promise to quit smoking _tomorrow_ – meaning she still had a handful of cigarettes to get through until she'd run out completely. And the Doctor would need to use her lighter to get the fire going, anyway, so she decided to light up.

"They stink, you know," Matilda said, "I can't wait for you to quit. Can't you go to AA for it, or something?"

"I'm quitting smoking, not nicotine," said Clara, "I'll still have patches and gum. And the e-cigarette."

"Do you ever wish you'd never started in the first place?"

"Every time I light one, yeah," Clara sighed, breathing out smoke, "How are you really feeling? About going to school? Excited, scared?"

"Both. What if I get bullied?"

"We've got anti-bullying measures," said Clara.

"What if I get bullied because I live with two teachers?"

"I don't think you will," said Clara, "People like the Doctor."

"Do they not like you?"

"Uh… well. Let's not get into that."

"What if people think I'm weird?"

"Most teenagers are weird," said Clara.

"Are you gonna be embarrassing?"

"Am I usually embarrassing…?"

"Sometimes."

"Look at these sticks!" the Doctor shouted at them from the beach, arms full of twigs, which she proceeded to drop at her feet in a big clump while grinning. Clara held her cigarette between her teeth and gave the Doctor a thumbs up.

"Brilliant!" she said, encouraging the Doctor's ardent enthusiasm.

"Will there be any cool trips?"

"I heard a rumour about a trip to the Somme you'd have to ask my wife about, but if you're not doing History you won't be able to go on it. And she won't be going on it without me there, anyway."

"You wouldn't let her go on a school trip without you?"

"It's not _that_ – she wouldn't want to go," Clara said, walking down to the beach now the Doctor had sat down, arranging her twigs into the optimum cone shape. "Would you, sweetheart?"

"Would I what?"

"Go on that trip to the Somme."

"Oh, I mean, I've been to the Somme numerous times. Plus, I'm really concerned about what kind of discourse Nick wants to surround this trip in – like, are we glorifying the Second World War now, or what? _I_ said we should go on a trip to Scotland, learn about someone cool. Like William Wallace. Everybody hates the English, right? Or, we could go to India and learn about how the British destroyed it."

"I think you'd have visa troubles," Clara told her, sitting down on the sand next to the makeshift campfire. Mattie sat next to her.

"Why don't you go to America?" Mattie suggested.

"Been there, done that, Kerouac-style. Fourth honeymoon, always my favourite – hitchhiking. Then again, might be cool to take the kids to Gettysburg… or Wall Street. To learn about the evils of capitalism and how it'll be the ruination of your so-called 'society.'"

"Is there no English department trip?" Mattie asked Clara now.

"Oh, we just go to the Globe," Clara said, "See whatever Shakespeare we choose to do. This year's _Much Ado_ , I can't wait."

"You finally got Tom to back down, then?"

"Sweetheart, he wanted to do _The Winter's Tale_. I mean, seriously."

"Oh, no. How awful."

"I'm still fighting him about Tennessee Williams. He's desperate to do _Streetcar_."

"And what do you want to do?"

" _Orpheus_. It's chronically underrated. Anyway, I'm in charge, not Tom."

"Do you not like him?" Mattie pressed, probably dying to get her hands on some gossip before school began.

"Tom's great," said Clara, "We just have differing opinions when it comes to… everything."

"She says that," the Doctor interjected, "But they're both modernists, meaning they're both jerks. Only jerks are modernists."

"I don't know what that means."

"You don't want to," the Doctor said knowingly, "It starts innocently enough with Virginia Woolf, but then suddenly you find yourself knee-deep in _Finnegans Wake_ and you're like, how did it ever come to this?" But she had lost Mattie's attention. "Are any staff from other departments allowed to come and see _Much Ado_ at the Globe, by any chance? I know they weren't allowed when you went to see _Macbeth_ last year – but that was when Rhonda was still in charge, before she retired."

"Oh, I see, so you think just because you're married to the head of English, you can sneak your way onto a trip to the Globe? That's nepotism at its finest."

"It's not nepotism."

"Favouritism?"

"I like the play, jeez, bite me."

"If you want to come that badly, I'll look into it – but you have to sort out cover with Nick yourself," Clara told her, "Anything to avoid dealing with Ritter on my own. That woman is… urgh."

"Will I be in your classes?"

"Almost definitely not."

"Thank god."

"Excuse me?"

"I'd get sick of you," she said honestly. The Doctor snickered to herself. Clara picked up a twig and threw it at her.

"Hey! That's my fire!" Thirteen protested, "Why do you gotta ruin everything you touch?" Clara rolled her eyes. "This is the problem with women."

"Of course it is," Clara dismissed her, shaking her head.

"When do I find out, like, my timetable? Don't they post them beforehand?"

"No."

"What if I get lost?"

"You'll be alright," Clara assured her, "You'll know your way around within a few days." The Doctor wordlessly held out her hand towards Clara, prompting Clara to hand over her silver cigarette lighter so that she could light the fire.

"Don't you know how to light a fire by rubbing sticks together?" Mattie questioned.

"I-"

"No, she doesn't," said Clara, "She spent three hours trying to light a fire like that once. Really ruined her threat of destroying my Playboy collection." Mattie raised her eyebrows and Clara stammered to fix what she'd set. "Not that – erm – not that I'd ever… you know, it's wrong to objectify women. Pornography is traditionally misogynistic and, uh… don't, um… you should treat women with, you know, respect."

"And you say you're a teacher?" Mattie jibed.

"Shut up," Clara said. The Doctor finally got her twigs to light, and the little stack was engulfed in flame quite quickly.

"Ha! If only I had your Playboys now, they'd be going up in smoke."

"They're very valuable collectibles. And they have _literary merit_. Nabokov published short stories in them. _Nabokov_ , darling."

"Yeah, yeah… where're the marshmallows?" The marshmallows were right next to her, as Mattie pointed out, and they finally stopped bickering for long enough to roast them and make sandwiches out of chocolate Digestives. Not quite the traditional s'more, but they weren't the most traditional things to begin with.

"Here you are, subjecting us to your faux-American culture," Clara criticised.

"And what would we be eating if we left it to you? Sausage rolls with a side-helping of scurvy? That's British cuisine for you." Clara laughed. "Oh, sh- look! Check it out! Meteors!" The Doctor dropped her marshmallow in the fire to point straight up at the sky.

The event was just beginning, right on time; the sky littered with more shooting stars than Matilda had ever seen before. It was as if the heavens themselves were moving, asteroids flying through the atmosphere, glittering, disintegrating on their way to Earth's surface.

"Wish my parents were here to see this," said Matilda sadly.

"Oh, your parents wouldn't want to see any boring meteors, Matts," said the Doctor, "They spent their lives out there _in_ the stars."

"Some people believe that when you die you become a star," said Clara.

"Which," the Doctor continued, "While scientifically absurd, is a nice idea. If I die one day, I can think of a much worse fate than becoming a star. Although…" her eyes strayed to the ether above.

"What?" asked Clara. The Doctor frowned, then pointed again.

"Did you-?" They followed her gaze, the vivid meteors arcing across their horizon. The Doctor could have sworn that for a second they moved in a different way to just abiding by the laws of gravity, dancing in a much more literal way. The volume of shooting stars was also quite a bit higher than she'd expected but dimmed again to the ordinary amount. "Nothing. Probably nothing."

"Are you sure? You're the expert when it comes to strange things falling from the sky."

"Yeah, no, I… I'll talk to Helix. Just seems there's more meteors than I thought there'd be. Could just be debris, though…" She smiled at Clara and Matilda, "Never mind me. Let's just enjoy it. Our last night of freedom."

"Except for weekends and holidays," Clara added.

"Yeah. But aside from that, our _last night of freedom_ …"


	14. Invasive Species - Chapter 2

_Invasive Species_

 _2_

"Now, then. Here we are, the 1st of September, starting a brand-new school year," Lorna Moore began, holding the attention of the entire staff room with no effort whatsoever. It was eighty-thirty in the morning, half an hour before the official beginning of school, and the new year briefing. "This marks my first _full_ year as headmistress at Turing High, and I plan to continue the improvements I started when I was brought on in March. Anyone who isn't pulling their weight will find themselves under severe scrutiny, I'm taking no prisoners when it comes to fixing the shit-show Nolan left behind – god rest her soul. Work hard for me and I'll keep Ofsted from breathing down our necks, understand?" Unenthusiastic murmurs followed, but they were enough to satisfy her. "And remember – stick to the syllabus and don't try and make friends with the students. They're not that interesting.

"I'd also like to remind everyone of the dress code, particularly the female staff," Moore looked very pointedly at Sarah Pickman, on Clara's left, when she said that, and Sarah self-consciously looked at the desk, "We may be in Brighton, but that's no excuse to be inappropriate. I'm also calling a heads of department meeting this time tomorrow morning, after all the heads have the opportunity to liaise with their staff about what their plans are for the term ahead. This meeting isn't a brainstorming session, it's an overview of plans you should already have thought of over the break. And trust me, if you come up with something on the spot, I'll be able to tell, and it won't reflect well on you. Heads of year I want to see on Wednesday at lunch time to talk about pastoral care arrangements for the upcoming term – I'd advise them all to actually meet with the form tutors before you come to me with any wild behaviour policy reforms.

"Finally, in your form periods today I want you _all_ to discuss this recent drug outbreak in London. Xboost. The Manifest drug." Clara had heard about this. "It's the kind of thing that could become a very dangerous fad for teenagers. The police have been in contact with me about it, and though it hasn't reached Brighton in great quantities _yet_ , I'd like to pre-empt it before it starts becoming a problem. So if you all make sure to focus on drug awareness, and especially this one – there's a lot of appeal to young kids in the idea of becoming superheroes, and it doesn't help to have this 'Lightning Girl' always on the news. The sooner we make it clear that substance abuse is never a good idea, the better.

"Now, if you'll excuse me I have to go prepare for the Year 7 welcome assembly – which I need this morning like a bullet to the brain. Mr Chapel, I can hopefully expect you to round up the form tutors for the incoming students and get to the main hall at some point within the next fifteen minutes, can't I?"

"Yes, of course," Kyle Chapel said awkwardly. Moore clearly didn't have much faith in him. She narrowed her eyes at him for a few seconds, and he sank under her gaze.

"Does anybody have any questions?" Silence. "Good. Ida's got your time tables and form registers, she'll be giving them to the year heads to distribute. And remember, we try to _stop_ fights and teen pregnancies. Not encourage them, and certainly not place bets – isn't that right, Mr Baxter?" Terrance looked at his feet and didn't answer her. She shook her head, visibly disappointed, and then swept out of the room. It took until the door closed completely for the idle chatter to start up again, Clara sipping her coffee and trying not to scratch at the nicotine patch stuck to her arm.

"Can you believe that?" Sarah protested, " _What_ is inappropriate about the way I'm dressed?"

"I can see your bra through your top," Clara answered, "That's what."

"Well _why_ are you looking?"

Before Clara could give any kind of defence, the head of ICT, Jeremy Wu, shouted from across the room, "Saz! Nice bra!"

"See?" said Clara.

" _How_ has he not been fired yet?" Sarah whinged.

"Dunno. Maybe you should complain about him. Again."

"Kyle's staring at you," said the Doctor, on Clara's other side, while they waited for their papers to be delivered.

"I know," said Sarah, "I'm trying to ignore him. While I still can."

"Won't be for long," an additional person joined their conversation, holding a stack of paper and glancing around the room, "He's your other form tutor."

"He's _what_!?" Sarah exclaimed while the Doctor and Clara tried to disguise their amusement. "Tell me you're joking, Lucia."

"No," Lucia said, handing Sarah a sheet of paper: her form register. Sarah was aghast, because there it was at the top of the page: Miss S. Pickman & Mr K. Chapel.

"Are you the new head of Year 11?" Clara asked Lucia, Miss Villanueva, a Maths teacher Clara had never really had anything to do with before. Lucia nodded, sorting out her paper. "Who'd you piss off to get that assignment?"

"I heard a rumour that the Year 11 form tutors are some of the most competent ones."

"Don't believe everything you hear," the Doctor quipped.

"And I get to boss around Joanna," she said, smirking to herself. Joanna Mueller – head of the Maths department. Clara thought _that_ sounded like a case of 'don't shit where you eat', but hadn't ever heard anything bad about Mueller. Though, she couldn't say _she'd_ be thrilled if Tom had suddenly been made a year head and started bossing her around; he was currently pawing his way through the biscuit tin trying to find custard creams in the corner. "Ah – here. I'll go round up the others." She handed Clara and the Doctor their identical registers and then vanished off to go find the other three tutors – Kyle, Joanna, and another unlucky soul.

"What's your new foster daughter's name, then?" Sarah asked, Sarah who had been told about Matilda more than once over the last few weeks – because she was the only person in the faculty Clara might actually call a 'friend', Sarah and maybe Tom on a good day – but had the memory of a fish.

"She's not our daughter, she's our ward," said the Doctor.

"Nobody says 'ward', though, you can't say _ward_. Would I call Louis and Marie my 'wards'?"

"Well, they're cats," said Clara. Sarah grew offended.

"So what if they're cats? It's no different to having kids."

"I think it might be," said Clara, frowning.

"Depends," Cameron McCloud joined their table, after being shepherded over by Lucia: the sixth, missing form tutor, surely, "Have you ever breastfed your cats?" he asked mock-seriously. Sarah could hardly contain her contempt.

"That is _not_ appropriate."

"I teach Biology!" he argued.

"Cat biology?" Clara questioned.

"We cast a wide net," he shrugged, "It's a very open syllabus."

"Of _course_ it is." The Doctor had snatched Sarah's form list by this point, perusing it until she triumphantly pointed out Mattie's name to Clara: _Matilda Smith-Jones_ , there in black and white.

"I feel bad for her," said Thirteen, "Having to put up with Sarah and Kyle…"

"Like the kids in your form have ever liked being taught by a married couple," Kyle said after he drifted over, holding his briefcase and brushing lint from the sleeves of his ugly, tweed suit. Clara still thought the only person she'd seen pull of tweed was her husband – and even that had always been debatable, since he did choose some odd colours.

"They do," said the Doctor, "We're popular. Well, _I'm_ popular. Clara's…" Clara waited patiently for whatever the next insult was going to be, but it wasn't as bad as she'd prepared for. "She's an acquired taste."

"Wow, that's _almost_ a compliment," said Clara.

"Don't get excited."

"You couldn't excite me if you tried," she said, sipping her coffee again. The Doctor scowled.

"What's this 'ward' like, then?" Sarah asked.

"Oh, she's fine," said Clara, "You won't have any trouble from her. Although – if you do, I'd appreciate you tell one of us first rather than reporting her to… whoever's in charge of behaviour."

"I'm more than happy to have a few responsibilities lifted from my shoulders," Lucia said when she returned with Joanna Mueller in tow, all of the Year 11 tutors finally assembled. "One less kid to worry about. Anyway – we've still got a while before the Year 11 welcome assembly," at least an hour, during which time Mattie would come to school for the late start on her bike, "I'd like to talk about pastoral care while we're all here, get it out of the way early. I need one of you from each form to be the primary tutor when it comes to who _I'm_ talking to about the forms. It'll have to be the Doctor and Cameron for 11-C and 11-B, and then one of you two." She indicated Sarah and Kyle, whose will-they-won't-they dynamic had got sickening _months_ ago.

"Well," said Sarah, flicking her hair, "I like to think that I'm always a person the kids come to in a crisis."

"But of course, when Sarah's out of her depth, it's usually me they come to. For the more personal matters."

"But there are some things even Mr Chapel isn't _completely_ qualified to deal with, which is where I come in."

"Yes. Although obviously, I get the last word on how to deal with the students."

"I wouldn't go to either of you, personally," said Cameron. Lucia glanced between them.

"…Sarah can do it," she decided, "She's got the most free time since so few kids take French. Science is a core subject." Neither of them were completely happy about that. "Now, I've got PSE outlines drawn up – this term I want to focus on justice and government. Teaching them not to be criminals, basically."

"Might be too late for some of them," said Cameron.

"I'll email the outlines out later, but it's all quite straight forward. Just try and stop them from breaking any laws – it reflects badly on the school if lots of them end up in prison. Oh, and Year 11 assemblies are on Fridays. Now, there's four Fridays this month; I'll be doing the first assembly, and then I want you lot to volunteer for the other three and cover certain topics."

"Which topics?" Clara asked.

"Well, this month is National Suicide Prevention Month, Sepsis Awareness Month, and National Literacy Month."

"I'll do sepsis," said Cameron. He was the Biology teacher, after all.

"I'll do an assembly on National Literacy Month, seeing as I am the most well-read here by quite a margin," said Kyle.

Lucia began uneasily, "I was hoping Clara would do it."

"Clara!? She's grossly under-qualified. Basically illiterate."

"I'm in charge of the entire English department," Clara reminded him, then she added to Lucia, "I'm more than happy to."

"I suppose that leaves you two with Suicide Prevention," Lucia sighed, glancing at Sarah and Kyle, "God help us all… there's two more Fridays after that, I want an assembly on Black History Month in October, and I'll do the last one about current events, or something." She looked at the Doctor when she said that.

"Consider me on board," she said, "I'm doing Civil Rights with Year 12 this term, anyway."

"Well, then, great!" Lucia smiled, "That's the assemblies sorted, and if you stick to my outline for tutorials – which I'll be checking up on regularly – then that should be everything." Clara didn't point out that Joanna, who was, again, Lucia's boss, got a free pass out of doing any assemblies. But Mueller did have a lot on her plate trying to get teenagers excited about Maths. "Then, good luck with the new year, and I hope we don't run into any problems…" Again, she glanced at Sarah and Kyle. "I'll see you all in assembly."

* * *

After having the absolute shit scared out of her by a petrifying assembly on the importance of some qualifications she had a year to pass and knew nothing about, Matilda had followed on a group of rowdy teenagers 'her own age' after having her name read from a list denoting the forms. She didn't know if it was better or worse than going into a parallel dimension full of nightmares. She'd also _sort of_ been hoping to scrounge a lift from Clara, but since Year 11 were – that morning – starting at 10:30, if she _did_ get a lift she'd've had to wait around in the van for two hours. Not that she disliked riding her bike to school, but on the first day it might have been nice… especially leaving the empty house on her own that morning, having to remember to lock up and living under Helix's watchful gaze.

She found herself entering the classroom last, after being led there by some haughty, red-headed teacher who reminded her of Donna Noble in a way she couldn't quite pin down, once everybody – who'd already been going to school together for years – had already sat down. There was one empty seat she spotted first, next to a girl who tightly carried a sketchbook around with her along with her school laptop, which she'd gotten out to draw in as soon as getting the opportunity. No actual lessons until after morning break, she heard, to get all the kids settled in for the year. Was that the standard fare? She hadn't a clue. She sat down next to the girl with the drawings.

And then she saw what the drawings _were_ , and couldn't stop herself from intruding.

"Is that the Lightning Girl?" she asked abruptly – but she'd seen Esther Drummond in her costume enough times to know it certainly _was_ the enigmatic Lightning Girl, complete with the glassy, electronic mask that covered her whole face and the cape she insisted on having despite it being impractical. Only she was being drawn like she was an actual superhero, or at least, one in a comic book.

"Uh…" the girl faltered.

"Sorry, was that rude?" Mattie asked, "It's just, they're really cool drawings, that's all."

"Oh…" the girl went red. "Thanks… do you, um, follow her?"

"What do you mean? Like, on Twitter?" Esther had a large presence on social media under her moniker.

"Well, just… what she's doing. Who she's saving."

"A bit," said Mattie, upon whom the novelty of the Lightning Girl was somewhat lost going by the fact Esther had babysat her as long as she could remember – and had only semi-recently taken up the mantle of being an electric vigilante. In the last five years or so. Very carefully, she partially confessed, "…I've met her, actually." The girl dropped her pencil. Mattie decided not to mention the fact she had Esther's personal phone number, and they had a long, ongoing message thread full of out-of-context gifs from various horror medias.

"Really!?"

"Yeah, she, like, saved me. When I was younger, from an oncoming car. I wandered into this road." That was all true, the only lie being that Esther hadn't been 'the Lightning Girl' at the time, and it was a lot longer ago than she was allowed to admit. "There was this roadkill I thought was really exciting."

"Did you say roadkill?"

"Yeah. It was an adder." Also true. She'd wanted to keep the dead adder, maybe get it taxidermied, but for some reason her parents hadn't been too keen on the idea of having an embalmed snake in the house. "They're cool, have you ever seen one? They've got red eyes."

"But what was the Lightning Girl like?"

"Oh, she's really nice. She's kind of a nerd. I think. She stuck around for a while to, uh, teach me about road safety and venomous snakes. Did you know that adders live basically everywhere in the world, including the Arctic Circle, but not in Ireland?"

"No."

"Well, she told me that."

"Wow. Does she like snakes?"

"She likes facts."

"Are you new?"

Mattie nodded, "Is it that obvious?"

"Well, everybody knows everybody here, so, yeah."

"I'm Matilda. Most people call me Mattie, but I'm fine with either."

"I'm Akiko. Most people call me Aki, because I hate being called Akiko," she copied. Mattie smiled.

"Alright, alright, settle down," said their form tutor loudly, even though the class had been relatively quiet to begin with. There was silence right away, but she still waited for a while before she was finally satisfied. "Now, then. For all of you I've had the pleasure of teaching over the last few years, you'll know I have a firm but fair philosophy, and won't accept anything less than your complete respect-" Here she was interrupted by sniggers throughout the room. She wasn't happy about that, and stopped speaking again until the sniggering dissipated.

Another interruption arrived however, in the form of a tall, middle-aged man in what Mattie thought was a very tasteless, brown tweed suit, carrying a briefcase.

"I'm sure Miss Pickman has already given the necessary introductions, but let's make things clear. You all know I have a firm but fair philosophy, and I won't accept anything less than complete respect-" Miss Pickman cleared her throat loudly. "…Did you want something?"

"It's just, I already said that. That was my bit."

"Was it?"

"You knew it was. I told you about it earlier."

"I think you'll find, it was _I_ who told _you_."

"Don't think so."

"Mm, well, I suppose you've just had one of your memory lapses-"

" _Memory lapses_?" Pickman argued, blatantly offended.

"I'm sure the students are quite aware of your shortcomings."

" _Shortcomings_?"

"Endearing shortcomings!" he attempted to backtrack.

"And this from a man who forgot my birthday last year."

"It's not like you reminded anybody."

"You shouldn't need reminding," she snapped.

Aki leant over to Mattie and whispered, right as the rest of the class seemed to descend into conversation and murmuring again, "They're always like this. They'll get too busy arguing to tell anybody off now."

"Really?" Mattie asked, "Isn't that a bit unprofessional?"

"Yeah, but it gets us out of work," she said, while they continued to bicker. Were Clara and the Doctor like that when they taught classes?

"Who are they? What're their names?" she asked, "Like, their first names. Do you know?" She wanted to know if she could pin them down to any of Clara's anecdotes about the school; maybe she'd heard things about them.

"Sarah Pickman and Kyle Chapel, I think," Aki said. And Matilda had certainly heard _plenty_ about Sarah and Kyle. She'd thought Clara had been exaggerating about their constant, non-stop arguments, which apparently put her and her wife's bickering to shame, but clearly not.

"Seems weird they'd be given a joint form, if they're like this," said Mattie, "I mean, surely other teachers know about it?"

Aki shrugged, "How would I know? I don't talk to teachers."

"No, right, why would anyone want to talk to a teacher?" Mattie tried to joke, but it came across very awkward and fell flat. Aki frowned at her.

"…Did you just move here, then?" she asked.

"Yes, to Brighton," she nodded, "Only from the Isle of Wight, though."

"I was new last year, dad wanted to move down from London," she said, "I hate moving. Six years ago we came over from Japan."

"Oh, right. Do you speak Japanese, then?" Mattie asked. She nodded. "That's _so_ cool. I wish I could speak another language…" Fifty years old and she hadn't learnt to say a word in anything other than English. "Why'd you move from London?" Aki paused before answering. "Sorry, am I being annoying? Grating? Irritating? Asking too many questions? I've been told I ask too many questions."

"You're… a bit strange."

"Really? Shit… how strange? Like, I won't make friends?"

"Uh…"

"What about you? If you were new last year, how did you make friends? Do you think they'd be my friends?" Again, Aki said nothing. "Sorry. I'm doing it again, aren't I?"

"It's not that, I just don't really have any friends."

"Why not?"

"Nobody talks to me and I don't talk to them."

"Really? Should I go sit somewhere else then?" Mattie asked.

"No, it's… I guess I'm strange too."

"Quiet down," Pickman said loudly, "Mr Chapel's got your time tables to hand out."

"Do I?" Chapel asked.

"Yes," she said, sitting down behind her desk and pushing a stack of papers towards him.

He paused, then said, "Well, I don't see why I should have to-" but she glared at him. It was an expression with enough power – over Chapel, at least – to get him to do as she wanted. He sheepishly picked up the papers and began handing them out to the students, having to ask more than half of them what their names were. At least that meant Mattie wouldn't stick out, since he definitely _would_ have to ask her name.

While he did that, Pickman addressed the class again, "Assemblies for Year 11 are every Friday, so you'll be in the hall after lunch without fail. _Don't_ come here first, go straight to assembly. And yes, form is important _and_ mandatory; I don't want any of you skiving to try and get longer dinners. This term we're going over law and justice, so if you could try not to commit any crimes before October that would be best. After that, we can say we did everything we could and the school won't get the blame for your behaviour. There's twenty minutes until break, so you can talk amongst yourselves; I know it's what you're all dying to do anyway."

"There's a rumour that those two are secretly sleeping together," Aki told Mattie quietly.

"I can believe that," she said, having heard the rumour second-hand from Clara. "…You didn't say why you moved from London."

"I don't know. Dad had a coffee shop in London, but it wasn't doing well so he decided to move me and my little brother to Brighton," she said, "I think it's doing better here. He doesn't talk to me about business, though. What about you? What do you parents do?"

"Um…" she faltered. She hadn't expected to be asked so bluntly about her parents, and not so soon. But she was rescued from having to answer immediately by Chapel bringing over the timetables.

"And you are?"

"Matilda," she answered, "Smith-Jones." When she said her name she could have sworn she saw Pickman look up from the front of the room, studying her for a second, but she tried to ignore it. Chapel found her time table.

"And you?" he prompted Aki.

"Akiko Inoue," she said. After another few seconds, he finally found hers and handed it over. "Your surname is 'Smith-Jones'?" she asked Mattie when he'd skulked away to.

"Yeah. Why?"

"Just sounds like a fake name someone would just make up."

"Dad was Smith, mum was Jones. She didn't want to take his name. She used to say, she worked hard to become Dr Jones and didn't want to lose that by becoming Dr Smith. Something like that. Dad didn't mind," Mattie said while reading over her paper. She spotted something when glancing at Aki's, "Look, we have art together after break."

"Oh, yeah."

"You wouldn't mind showing me where the room is?" Mattie asked, "I think we have almost the same timetable."

"No, it's fine," she said, "Why did you pick art?"

"I like special effects. Like, gory ones. Wounds and stuff."

"Really? Are you good at them?"

"Kind of. My mum used to help with them. She was a doctor, like I said."

"…You keep saying 'was'…"

"Yeah, they, um… they're not… they're gone now. Recently, sort of… I don't want to talk about…"

"Shit, I'm sorry," Aki apologised quickly, "I didn't-"

"I mean, why would you? I'm new, like you said," Mattie said, smiling uneasily. They really _did_ almost have the exact same time table; except where Matilda had French, Akiko had history – with the Doctor, she noticed, 'Dr Oswald.'

"What's up with your eye?" Aki asked suddenly, startling her. Mattie blinked hard to try and sort it out, shaking her head slightly.

"Nothing, it's lazy," she said, "It's never really let itself be corrected. Used to be a lot worse. When I was a baby, I had to wear an eyepatch. I'm short-sighted, too. Basically blind." Aki laughed a little, though Mattie wasn't sure it was much of joke. "What do you know about these teachers, anyway?"

"Um… Miss Stark is a bit weird," art teacher, "Mrs Mueller's strict but she's a really good teacher," maths, "Mr Miller… I think he tries too hard to, like, be 'cool', but I suppose he's alright," English, "McCloud's the same, he thinks he's funny."

"What about, um, your history teacher?"

"Are you doing history?"

"No, but… I'm just interested. To learn. About the school."

"I don't know," said Aki, "I've never had the Doctor before."

"Does she really make _everyone_ call her 'the Doctor'?" Mattie questioned. Aki was perplexed. "I mean, it's just… who does that? Who's just called 'the Doctor'?"

"Well, she's Dr Oswald. She's married to one of the English teachers. Mrs Oswald. They're lesbians." They weren't, Mattie knew, but she was come across as even stranger if she said she knew the intricacies of an English teacher she was pretending she'd never met's sexuality. "Everyone loves the Doctor, though, she's supposed to be really good."

"What about her wife?"

"I don't know," she shrugged, "Gross boys are always saying really grim things about her."

"Oh. Eurgh."

"They fancy her."

"Right…"

The bell rang, and everybody pushed their chairs out to leave. Matilda hastened to pick up her backpack and sling it over her shoulder, while Pickman called another reminder about form being important and assemblies – though nobody really paid attention to her.

"You will show me where the classrooms are, right?" Mattie implored.

"I can't really stop you from following me."

"Yeah, I guess…"

"But, sure. Of course. I told you, I was new last year, and I didn't have anybody offer to show me around."

"Well, I appreciate it, a lot. Even if you do think I'm weird. So, um, which way's the canteen?"

"It's just, um…" Aki began, but then got distracted looking out of the window as the number of students in the room began to dwindle.

Perplexed, Mattie followed her gaze, but couldn't work out what she was looking at, "What? What is it?"

"Nothing, just… there's a lot of trees out there, don't you think?"

"I don't know."

"Shouldn't the leaves be falling off by now?"

"Maybe. Who knows, with climate change?"

"Yeah, I guess. Canteen's just this way…"

* * *

There was a knock at Clara's office door. She'd had a free period and was in the middle of lesson plans, really hoping it wasn't Tom coming to bother her about something trivial.

"Come in," she said, not lifting her eyes from the notes on her computer screen, trying to work out her structure for teaching _Dorian Gray_ to Year 13. To her surprise, it wasn't Tom: it was her wife, bringing lunch in from the canteen. "Don't you have a lesson now?"

"It's lunch," she said, "Did you not notice the time? We were gonna eat together, but I didn't see you."

"It's-?" she looked at the clock on her computer and realised they were already ten minutes into dinner. "Bollocks. Sorry, sweetheart. I lost track of time. I was focusing really hard on this to take my mind off my cigarette craving…"

"Snowed under on the first day, huh?"

Clara smiled, "Not really, I'll tell you about it in a minute. Did you buy me lunch?"

"Of course I did," she said, bringing her plastic tray with precariously balanced contents over while Clara pushed her keyboard aside to make space on the desk. She did like having her own office, a head of department luxury; she got to keep personal effects in there and everything, like a framed photo of she and the Doctor on one of their many wedding days – a photo the Doctor had given her as an 'office-warming' present. "I'd hate for you to miss out on the canteen's vegetarian cottage pie." The vast majority of the food at the school was vegetarian, part of a health initiative started decades ago – which had proven quite effective.

"Now that I think about it, I'm _starving_. Thanks for looking out for me."

"You don't have to thank me, Coo," said Thirteen, amused, as Clara tucked into her cottage pie. "What do you want for dinner, anyway?"

"Fish and chips, like we always get on the first day of a new term," Clara said, "So you don't have to cook. I don't think we have anything in, anyway, we need to go shopping. We're almost out of lube."

"Charming… moving on, what's got you working through lunch?"

"The aesthetic in _Dorian Gray_."

"Jeez."

"How many lessons?"

"Two?" she suggested, "But, oughtn't you set up the literary theme of the aesthetic beforehand? Take it back to its roots in Romanticism and the sublime – or you can go the other way and historicise it with Marxist theory?"

"You try to bring Marxism into everything."

"I'm just saying, the portrait is a commodity, a luxury. What's Wilde trying to say by making the painting into an embodiment of sin, and the Devil? Sin is beautiful, or beauty is sinful?" the Doctor said. Clara thought about this while chewing her food. "Dorian's life is inherently shallow, and empty, and he strives to fill it with beautiful things, all to no avail."

"But he repents."

"And commits suicide – a cardinal sin."

"Mistakenly. And the picture is restored. So how does that fit in? Beauty only maintains its integrity when untarnished by the whims of man?" Clara argued.

"But what about the knife? Another object, commodity. An idealised instrument."

"Which finds itself embedded in the heart of an embittered, old man. Are we idealising commodities or vilifying them? What we're left with at the end is a commodified display of the aesthetic. Is aesthetic a commodity?"

"I think it is in Wilde," the Doctor shrugged, "They're all upper class. I mean, you look at Sibyl – she's poor, but _she's_ the commodity. She has nothing beautiful except herself."

"And he throws her away."

"But maybe he throws the painting away, by repenting. The book is chiefly about the superficiality of possessions."

"If he really sheds all his possessions at the moment he commits suicide-"

"By destroying his last possession, his eternal youth."

"-Then how would your Marxist world-view explain the rings? He dies, they can only identify him by the rings on his hand. Signifiers of opulence, aesthetically pleasing opulence."

"Even in death, he's still defined by beauty."

"So he never escapes it. So you're contradicting yourself. You said he fills his life with beauty and in death he loses them – but that doesn't make sense if you're solely characterising beauty by what _you_ define as commodity," Clara continued. The Doctor thought about this.

"Well, maybe you should be posing to them a question of the self, outside of aestheticism. Through the action of his death, is Dorian restoring himself or destroying himself? The picture goes back to its undamaged state, but he dies an old man. If Dorian's self is less his soul and more his beauty – which goes back to the question about sin – then is his soul in fact preserved? Made immortal, through the preservation of the original picture? If he is so superficial as to be his own image, then maybe he doesn't lose his eternal youth at all, but rather ensures it."

"Hmm… remind me to write that down, I'll use that… it's less convoluted than trying to shoehorn commodity fetishism into everything," she said.

"This is new this year, right?"

"Yeah."

"So, why don't you start by talking about the aestheticism of the prose itself? The narrative? Get away from thinking entirely about the beauty of a painting and talk about semantical poetics," she suggested, "It's very dense, after all. If you want to do two lessons on aestheticism as a theme, I mean."

"Maybe, maybe… I don't know. I was just thinking about how to get into the text without immediately historicising it, you know? Give them at least a taste of death of the author before suddenly everything becomes subtextually related to how Wilde was queer."

"Everything _is_ subtextually related to how Wilde was queer," the Doctor pointed out.

"I know, but sometimes it's nice to go into things blind, with a fresh perspective. It's easy to get bogged down in authorial intention, is all I mean. And this is sixth form, they need to be thinking wider. Enough about that, though. How's your day going?"

"Well, we've got two classes in Year 10 at the moment, which means I got to start the Treaty of Versailles before lunch, and at the end of the day I get to start it again, which is _thrilling_ , truly," she said, sounding unmistakably bored. "November Criminals. Big wow. Do you want to go out this week?"

"How do you mean?"

"Like, a date."

"Sure. Where were you thinking?"

"I heard a rumour about a mock speakeasy somewhere near the promenade. I thought it might be nice to get dressed up and try to find it."

Clara smiled warmly at her, "Sounds great. Friday's best. Do you want me to call Rose and see if she'll come and watch Matts? I'm sure she will. I'm sure she'll jump at the chance to see Mattie without us hanging around. Though, I could see if someone else will do it? Esther? Adam?"

"No, it's fine… it's weird, huh?"

"What is?"

"Having a kid to think about. Look out for. Call people to babysit."

"I guess – but you know what? I like it," Clara said, "Feels worthwhile. Important. You know?"

"I do, I do… I hope she's okay."

"I'm sure she'll be fine. But, um, there was something else I wanted to talk to you about." The Doctor raised her eyebrows expectantly, waiting. "About this Xboost thing. The Manifest drug."

"What about it?"

"Well, do you think we should try and do something about it? Find out what's causing it? It's been decades – why would it suddenly resurge now, in the form of a street drug?" Clara asked.

"I don't know – because if you take it you get superpowers? As opposed to other drugs, which only make you _feel_ like you've got superpowers, when actually you're elbow-deep in the grossest toilet in all of Scotland wading through faeces trying to retrieve an opiate suppository."

"Have you been watching _Trainspotting_ again?"

"…It's a good movie…"

"I'm serious. Since we're lecturing the kids on it this afternoon, we might as well at least _think_ about it. What if they're right about predicting another epidemic? What if it's like it was in the 2010s all over again? People being sectioned, incarcerated, experimented on?"

"It's a police priority, they've been dealing with substance abuse for a long time, Coo," the Doctor said.

"Since when do you trust the police?"

"It's not that, I just… I don't think that we, as in the two of _us_ , are in any position to go messing around in official police business. Not with Mattie to look out for. What if we get arrested? Or wanted for arrest, and we have to leave? It's not worth the risk," she explained carefully, "Why don't you bring it up to Esther? Or your sister? They might be looking into it already."

"Yeah, I suppose you're right…"

"Obviously this Xboost thing worries me too, especially if it might cause another Manifest Crisis and more contemporary human rights abuses – but… we're limited. And I hate to admit that more than anyone, of course I do. Jenny was with the police for a while, she might want to look into it."

"Anyone except us, you mean?"

"Mattie's our priority. As long as we can stop _her_ from taking any street drugs…"

"I suppose you're right. But it still worries me."

"I wouldn't expect anything less," said the Doctor, smiling, putting her knife and fork down on her plate, "Not from the most compassionate, empathetic woman I've ever met."

"Says the girl who just bought and delivered me lunch in my office."

"Mm, but unfortunately, it's time to leave your office and go to class. Because it's the end of lunch, and we have to give a drugs talk to a bunch of teenagers who probably think drugs are awesome."

* * *

"Do you think I'm weird?" Mattie asked over dinner that very same evening. She sometimes wanted to eat in her room, but Clara had a habit of insisting she join the two of them downstairs in the kitchen to eat. That day though, she was eager to talk to them and tell them about her day – her first _ever_ day at a school, with other teenagers, doing lessons. They'd got fish and chips, some sort of tradition the two of them had, which Matilda certainly wasn't going to complain about. Though, she _would_ complain about how Clara had drenched her battered sausage and chips in the ghastliest amount of mayonnaise known to man; the Doctor had done the same thing, with hot sauce. Mattie just had salt, because she wasn't a complete freak. Or so she thought.

"A bit, why?" Clara said, "But in a nice way. It's endearing."

"I'm _weird_!?"

"Well, the Doctor's weird," said Clara, nodding at the Doctor, who was trying to shove as many chips into her mouth as physically possible. She scowled.

"How am I weird?" she said, hardly even comprehensible.

"I've no idea," said Clara sarcastically. "Why're you worried about being weird? Everyone's a bit weird."

"Yeah, look at you, with your mayonnaise," the Doctor quipped after swallowing her chips.

"It's just, someone said I'm weird."

"Who? Are you being bullied?" Clara asked.

"No, I'm not being bullied. And if I was, I wouldn't tell you."

"Why wouldn't you tell me?" Clara asked, looking genuinely upset.

"Because! You'll try to… sort it out."

"So?"

"It'd be _embarrassing_." Clara rolled her eyes. "And, anyway, I'm not being bullied. So it doesn't matter." She ate another chip.

"Well, who was it? Who said you're weird?"

"This girl. Aki. Akiko."

"She was in my class last year," said Clara, "Top set Year 10. Can't imagine her calling you a weirdo."

"She didn't say I was a _weirdo_ , she said I'm 'strange'," Mattie did inverted commas with her hands, "She's nice, I think we're friends. She does these cool drawings, have you seen them? Of Esther."

"Esther?" they both asked.

"Like, the Lightning Girl, I mean. She thinks she's cool. I never really thought about it, but I suppose she sort of is. If you don't know her. She's a lot more boring in real life… but in a nice way."

"You're just desensitised," Clara said, "Ought to get some perspective on how your long-term babysitter is an actual superhero. And cute, as well."

"Maybe I should tell everyone. I could call her and get her to come in. Aren't Year 11 supposed to be learning about the law this term?"

"I don't think encouraging them to become vigilantes is what Lorna has in mind," said the Doctor, "Not with this new Manifest street drug going around…" Mattie had heard about that, but the news reports were being skimpy on the details. "Although… it _would_ be cool to have her as a guest speaker."

"She doesn't do interviews," Clara said.

"But we're old friends!" the Doctor protested.

"We're not getting Esther to give a speech in a school."

"Aki told me all the boys in our year say gross things about you," Mattie told Clara.

"They don't say gross things about me, they say them right to my face," Clara sighed, "It's quite awful. I don't know why the Doctor doesn't get any of it."

"What do you mean?" the Doctor asked.

"I mean you're hot," Clara said.

"Do you think?"

"Do I-? Of course I think! You're my wife, stupid. I'm not gonna marry someone I don't very well think is hot, am I?" Clara said.

"I suppose not."

"Whatever… so, you've made a friend already, then?" Clara resumed talking to Matilda, picking the batter off her sausage with her fingers.

"I think so. I hope I didn't annoy her. She said she doesn't have any other friends."

"I never see her talking to anyone," Clara said, "But I suppose if Sarah's got friends, anyone can do it."

"Yeah, but you're Sarah's friend," said the Doctor, "That doesn't really prove anything."

"That reminds me – is she sleeping with Mr Chapel? Or are they going out?" Mattie interjected.

"No," Clara said.

"Are you sure? Were they going out and they broke up?"

"Nope. They're just basically in love with each other but neither of them wants to admit it, so they argue all the time. And he's a prick, to be honest. Don't tell anyone I said that."

"This morning he called you illiterate," the Doctor pointed out.

"I know, I remember." Mattie thought he certainly _must_ be a prick if he'd called Clara illiterate; the house was absolutely overflowing with stacks of books. "Speaking of Sarah and Kyle, how was your anti-drugs talk this afternoon?"

"What anti-drugs talk?" Mattie was confused.

"The anti-drugs talk we were all told to give to the Year 11s," Clara explained. Mattie frowned. "Did… did they not warn you about drugs?"

"No, they spent all of form time arguing."

"Right…" Clara stopped to think, then the Doctor took over the conversation.

"They were meant to warn you all against this new Xboost thing," she said, "The Manifest drug. You won't take any drugs, will you?"

"No," she said, "And what would be the point of a Manifest drug? I'm already a Manifest, technically." It was why she aged so slowly; inhuman longevity.

"Well, we were saying we want to keep an eye on it," the Doctor continued, "In our capacity as time travellers, rather than as teachers, we mean. So if you hear anything circulating at school about it showing up in Brighton and people trying it, we'd appreciate you letting us know so we can tell someone who can actually act. Esther or Jenny, or something."

"Okay…" she agreed slowly.

"Let us know if Sarah and Kyle carry on being shit, too," Clara said, "Maybe I'll grass them up to Lucia. If they're not going their jobs properly. I think their forms could benefit from swapping Kyle with Cameron."

"Oh, please, their rivalry is bad enough," the Doctor laughed, "Don't make it worse. Besides, what's to say she won't decide to swap one of _us_ around?"

"I suppose so…"

"I wouldn't want to get them in trouble," Mattie began suddenly.

"They're getting themselves in trouble," said Clara.

"Let Lucia tell them off," the Doctor advised her again.

"Fine, fine…"

"Now. That's enough grease and oil for one evening," said the Doctor, pushing away her greasy, oily fish and chip paper, "Who's for dessert?"


	15. Invasive Species - Chapter 3

_Invasive Species_

 _3_

Four days into Matilda's career as a normal teenager, and her morale was attacked by an almighty rainstorm. The south coast was plunged into overcast darkness as clouds marched across the blue sky and emptied themselves in buckets across the city. Overcome by weather-induced lethargy, Mattie leant on the canteen table and stared out of the rippling window at the storm and the trees outside. The rain was so appalling, and had been appalling all night, that she'd scrounged a lift to school early that morning in the van with Clara and the Doctor. Branches smacked violently against the glass as she picked at her lukewarm pasta, struggling to find the appetite to eat any of it; she'd never been a huge fan of tomato.

"I remember this big typhoon coming over Kobe once, when I was little. I thought our building was going to fall down," Aki said, watching Mattie stare out of the window. They _were_ friends, it seemed, after Mattie's awkward first day. It felt like a miracle to be able to talk to somebody who wasn't an adult, somebody _younger_ than she was, who wasn't constantly telling her how concerned they were for her wellbeing. Not that she resented people caring about her, but it was refreshing to be around somebody who _wasn't_ bending over backwards to keep her in good spirits. Aki didn't eat the school food, she always brought a packed lunch made by her culinary-minded father; sometimes the Doctor was known to make packed lunches, but not so far that week. Mattie hoped _she'd_ get offered one the next time Thirteen deigned to make some; maybe she could ask for one every day when mushy pasta was being served? "Ryusei was just a baby, he cried all night."

"How old is he?"

"Eight. He was only two when we moved to England."

"I sometimes wish I had a sibling…" she said thoughtfully. She said that, but she was mostly distracted thinking about what was for dinner: Thursday night was, she had been told that morning, Fajita Night. She'd also been told the Doctor would be glad to have her help cooking everything, since Clara was fatally useless when it came to anything related to the kitchen.

"No, you don't. It's like I'm an unpaid babysitter half the time," she complained, "I always have to watch him when dad's watching the shop." Mattie had deduced that Aki and Ryusei's mother wasn't in the picture anymore, but didn't see the need to pry into that. It surely wasn't a good story, not any more than her talking about her dead parents would be. "You know Steph's staring at you?"

"What? Who's Steph?" Mattie sat up, confused.

"Stefani Kaczmarek. To my left, next table," Aki said, "With all those _girls_." It was a table clustered with what Matilda would describe as the 'popular girls' if she watched too many films about high school life rather than actually experiencing it for herself – which she had, so for all intents and purposes, it was a table clustered with popular girls. They were pretty and indistinguishable from one another.

"Which one is the one you're talking about?"

"The one who has the braces," said Aki, "The blonde one who clearly isn't a natural blonde."

"I don't think any of them are natural blondes," said Matilda, feeling her lazy eye start to stray off course. She looked down at her plate of pasta again, then made a noise of annoyance and pushed it away from her. "Do you want some pasta?" she asked Aki.

"Nope. Do you want some sashimi?"

"Uh…"

"It's salmon."

"No, thanks."

"I've got some onigiris left?"

"What're they?"

"Rice balls. These ones have chicken in them," she said, pointing them out in her tupperware container with her chopsticks. Mattie was debating whether she wanted to try an onigiri or not, when Aki swore. "Shit, she's totally coming over."

"What?" But Aki didn't say anything else, just buried her head the rest of her sashimi and tried not to draw attention to herself. The girl with the braces and the bleached-blonde hair came gliding over from her 'popular' table, the other girls hardly paying any notice and still talking amongst themselves. Mattie was terrified she was about to find herself bullied by some cliché mean girl.

"Hi," said the girl, sliding into the seat next to Matilda, "You're cute."

"I'm… what?"

"Cute."

"Right… what?"

"C-U-T-E."

"Oh. Thanks. That's great. Can I help you with anything?" She desperately wanted Aki to say something to rescue her from whatever was going on. Was this what bullying was like? She shuffled as far away from the girl as she possibly could – then realised she _did_ know the girl, they had maths together, and science. She was generally seen in the company of a taller boy whose name escaped Matilda.

"I don't know, can you?"

"Um…"

"Are you going to eat this?" She nodded at Mattie's cold pasta.

"No," Mattie said, "It's kind of gross."

"You're Matilda, right?"

"Yeah."

"Does anyone call you Tilly?"

"No. It's Mattie."

"I'm Steph. Can I have this?" She indicated the pasta again.

"I, uh… I guess so." Maybe the bell would ring for the end of lunch and she could escape to form with Pickman and Chapel again. She slid the tray of pasta towards her and started eating it, apparently not caring that it was cold and disgusting.

"I saw something weird this morning," she said, "I saw this van, this really old, decrepit, camper van. The kind they made a hundred years ago." Mattie's blood ran cold; she knew where this was going. "And it's weird, because I saw you get out of it, even though I'm sure that van belongs to Dr and Mrs Hotswald."

"Sorry, did you call them 'Hots-wald'?"

"They're hot," Steph said, indifferent.

"Were you in their car?" Aki now finally said something.

"Well, um…" She hadn't yet explained her living situation to anybody, not even Aki. She didn't want anybody to treat her differently because she happened to live with two teachers.

"They're my form tutors," Steph said, eating more of the pasta, "And you definitely _were_ in their car."

"I thought you come to school on a bike?" asked Aki.

"I do, but it was raining this morning, so they offered me a lift," she said very uneasily.

"Do you live near them?" Steph persisted.

"I… suppose you could say that…"

"Where do they live?" she asked like it was an urgent matter.

"In Brighton," said Matilda.

"Well, obviously in Brighton. What's their address?"

"Why do you want to know their address?"

"So I can go see their house."

"But… why would you want to?"

"Because _they are hot_."

"I don't think they're that, um…" she didn't know what to say.

"Well? It's a bit dodgy, getting a lift with them, isn't it? What would your parents say?" Steph said, touching a nerve – though she can't have known she touched it.

"They are my, erm… I mean, they… they're my legal guardians," she said.

"They're _what_?" Aki exclaimed.

"Just – they were friends of my parents. Before my parents… you know."

"You _live with them_?" Aki continued.

"Yeah, alright, I live with them," she finally admitted.

"Can I come over to your house?" Steph asked suddenly.

"What? No! I don't even know you."

"Yes you do, I'm Steph. We have maths together. I'm sure they'd love to see me."

"I don't think they would, actually," said Matilda.

"Do you actually live with them? It's not a joke?" Aki implored.

"No, it's not a joke. Yes, I live with them… don't advertise it though, alright? I don't want people thinking I'll, I don't know, get them in trouble for things just because I live with teachers," she said quickly.

"Are they just as hot at home as they are at school?" Steph asked.

"I'm not sure that question really makes sense…"

"What are they like?" Aki asked.

"Good, I guess. I don't know. I've known them my whole life, really, I couldn't say," she shrugged.

"Do you know how Mrs Oswald got that weird scar?" Aki pressed.

"No, not really, nobody's ever told me."

"Have you ever seen them kiss?" Steph continued to pester her with increasingly inappropriate questions.

"I – probably? Why does that matter?"

"Could you take a photo next time they do?"

"No! What's wrong with you?"

"There's no need to be homophobic," Steph quipped.

"I'm not being homophobic, but that's just really… not right. They're your teachers, you should respect them."

"Does Mrs Oswald let you call her by her first name?"

"Call her 'Clara', you mean? Of course she does. I've never called her 'Mrs Oswald.'"

"How much would I have to pay you to give me her phone number?"

"Nothing!"

"So you'd do it for free?"

"No, I won't do it," Mattie said firmly, "What do you want to text her for, anyway?"

"Ask her about poetry…" Steph said wistfully.

"You can just ask her about poetry in person."

" _Love_ poetry."

"I don't think she'd reply, to be honest."

"I can be very persuasive," she said, leaning close to Matilda, but her breath smelt like the stale tomatoes of the pasta and made Mattie cough a little.

"Then why don't you 'persuade' her to give you her phone number herself? That way she can tell you no, and not me," Mattie remarked. Steph laughed.

"I've been trying all week! I need to employ other tactics. How about you go out with me?"

"Excuse me!?"

"Like, be my girlfriend."

"N-no! I don't really, you know – I don't – I'm not – girls aren't really, um-"

"Well, we can pretend."

"Why?"

"So that I can come over to your house, and then… you know."

"Do you want to spy on them…? Is that it?"

"Look, I'll break up with Hannah for you."

"Who's Hannah?"

"HANNAH!" Stehp suddenly shouted across the room at the table of 'popular girls', catching the attention of one who – if Matilda squinted – bore the most minute resemblance to Clara Oswald; at least, her hair was brown. "It's over between us. Sorry. I've got a new girlfriend now." She indicated Matilda.

"Um, no, you really don't," said Mattie, fumbling when she tried to pick up her bag, nearly tripping over her own feet as she escaped from the table, "I've got to go. Somewhere. Anywhere. Form, or something." Aki hastily packed away what was left of her lunch so that she could follow. Checking the wall clock, Mattie saw there were nearly ten minutes until the end of lunch, so she'd be stuck waiting outside of the classroom for a while. But she'd rather be there than in the company of Steph for one second longer. At the table across the room, Hannah had burst into tears and was being comforted by the other girls.

"I'll see you in maths tomorrow, Mattie," she called as Matilda fled the canteen. Aki was quick on her heels once she was out of the hall, away from the rainstorm and away from Steph.

"Is there something wrong with that girl?" Matilda asked Aki once she rejoined her.

"Probably lots of things," Aki said, "I wouldn't worry about it, she seems to find a new girlfriend or boyfriend every week."

"And _I'd_ rather not be one of them…" Mattie grumbled.

"So… they're your guardians? The Oswalds?"

"Yeah, they are. I would've said, but I didn't know if it'd make everyone hate me, or something like that."

"Why would it? Most people like them," said Aki, "There's worse teachers people could find out you live with. What are they like?" Mattie didn't say anything. "I don't mean in a creepy way, like Steph. I like the Doctor, she's a good teacher."

"They're… they're great, really. They're nice. Funny. Kind of nerds." She began to walk off down the corridors after taking a few deep breaths and reorganising her thoughts. They were going to be ridiculously early to form at this rate.

"They're _teachers_ , of course they're _nerds_."

"Says the biggest nerd in this entire school."

"Are you going to take Steph up on her offer?"

"Her offer of what? Coming to my house to stalk the Oswalds?"

" _No_ , of, like, going out with her."

"No! I don't like girls. Not like _that_."

"I guess if you did you'd've worked it out by now. Living with them."

"Well, exactly. And even if I did – I don't even _know_ her! And breaking up with someone right in the canteen in front of everybody?"

"Yeah, that's a bit mean to Hannah… I heard she's liked Steph for ages."

"You 'heard'? From who?"

"From… people just say things around me sometimes," she mumbled, "I think some of them think I can't speak English."

"Why would they think that? You speak perfect English," Mattie said, "You speak it better than I do, and I _only_ speak English."

"Not for much longer I hope, Matilda," said Miss Pickman curtly, sweeping around the corner in that way she had a habit of doing. They met right outside the door into the French classroom, Mattie displeased at the prospect of half an hour of form in there and then a solid hour of French. _Conjugations_ – could anything be more bland? "Not if I have anything to do with it. Shouldn't you two be eating lunch?"

"We just… really like form," said Matilda awkwardly. Aki didn't say a word, as was her habit around basically every teacher; maybe _that_ was why people thought she didn't speak English.

"Really? I see. Clara put you up to this, has she? Don't think I don't know."

"Don't think you don't know what…? What would Clara put me up to?"

"How should I know?"

"Because… you're the one who accused me of being up to something…? I'm just trying to avoid somebody in the canteen…"

"Oh. Well. That's no way to make friends."

"I don't want to be her friend," said Matilda. This was a bizarre exchange, quite frankly.

"Well. Seeing as you're here, you might as well come in," Pickman opened the door into the classroom and let them both through, "You know, as your form tutor, I _am_ responsible for your wellbeing in the school. If you're being bullied-"

"I'm not being bullied," said Matilda quickly.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

"Because if you _are_ being bullied-"

"Do I seem like somebody who'd be bullied?"

"A vulnerable young girl-"

"Vulnerable?"

"Don't keep interrupting me," she snapped suddenly, dropping a heavy folder onto her desk at the front of the room, "It's very rude. I'm merely concerned about how well you're adjusting. But you'd do well to drop that attitude."

"I have an attitude?"

"Yes!" Pickman waved a hand at her impatiently, " _That_ attitude. Those _questions_." Aki went and sat down in her usual place, the corner at the back of the room, in total silence. Mattie was reduced to this bombardment from Pickman. "If you must know, I'm having a very bad day, and an insolent teenager is the last thing I need. Especially when I'm only trying to help." She suddenly seemed close to tears. Mattie tried to look to Aki for some help, but Aki's eyes were glued to her notebook again.

"Um… I'm sorry, Miss. Are you alright?"

"Why wouldn't I be alright!?"

"You just said you're having a bad day…"

"Just go and sit down and do some reading. You'll be lucky I don't put you in detention tonight for the way you've spoken to me." Mattie couldn't see that she'd done anything wrong, but certainly did not want to argue and get herself in more trouble. If she got in detention for this, Clara would be dragged into things, and that wouldn't be ideal. She went to sit next to Aki in the corner and tried her best not to say a single word for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, while Matilda stopped herself from making any sounds, she couldn't stop her phone. It buzzed in her pocket, a message from Clara, asking if she wanted a lift home that evening too since the raining was only supposed to get worse. She _had_ brought her bike with her in the back of the van, in case it let up, but didn't think she wanted to brave the storm that afternoon. Pickman cleared her throat loudly.

"No phones out during form time."

"Well, it's still lunch, technically," Mattie began.

"Right – you're getting on my last nerve today. You're staying back after school. Detention. And put your phone away."

"Yeah… it's just, it's Mrs Oswald? Asking if I want a lift home? So if I've got a detention, I should really let her know."

Pickman paused, thinking, clenched her jaw, "…I suppose since this is your first incident, I'll let you off. No need to go running to other members of staff, is there?" After hastily letting Clara know that she would like a lift home, she stuck her phone back in her pocket and resigned herself to not saying another word for an hour and a half.

She succeeded, too, apart from mumbling a few choice French phrases she hadn't a hope of understanding; there was something about foreign languages that just went straight over her head. It was an immense relief when she was finally able to escape Miss Pickman's classroom and the tyranny of the languages department, to go to a science lesson with Mr McCloud. She thanked god every day that she wasn't forced to have Mr Chapel for science; he was bad enough for form, even if he only seemed to show up half the time.

But there was one newly-discovered detriment to science lessons: the presence of Stefani Kaczmarek. Even worse was the fact that she again managed to seize the stool next to Matilda, after apparently being ostracised from her own friend group following the incident with Hannah over lunch.

Mattie was in the middle of talking to Aki about their nightmarish French lesson when Steph slid into the next chair in the back corner of the room – which was where Aki preferred to sit no matter which lesson she was in.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" Steph asked, already marking her territory by getting out a very vibrant array of neatly-organised stationary. It was at this point Matilda realised she didn't have a choice in the matter.

"What about your other friends?" Mattie asked, nodding at the gaggle of girls on the other side of the room; they were flocking around the very wounded Hannah, eyes red and swollen from sobbing all afternoon. They shot a glare in Steph's direction every now and then – and, subsequently, Mattie's direction.

"I'm not close with them," Steph shrugged, "Melissa, the tall one, she's still not forgiven me for dumping her before summer. Guess I'm looking for some new blood. I can't sit with the boys, either, because Jake's in a mood with me. And because his friend, Ewan, was my summer boyfriend." She sure did seem to get around, leaving chaos in her wake and a long line of people who wanted nothing to do with her.

"And you dumped him, too?"

"No. He broke up with me – told me I have a 'porn habit', can you believe it?"

"I can," said Mattie, and Steph laughed like she was the funniest person in the world; it just made Mattie distrust her even more, and she wrapped her hand around her phone in her pocket to stop Steph from trying to snatch it and steal Clara's mobile number.

"Cute _and_ funny. You're a winning combination."

Mattie didn't know what to say, still supremely uncomfortable. McCloud called for them all to settle down, rescuing her from having to come up with another way to rebuff Steph, and got everyone focused on the task at hand: GCSE Physics. They were looking at the light spectrum, and later, red shift. Mattie happened to think red shift was _quite_ interesting and decided to spend her afternoon focusing all of her attention on outer space, rather than Steph's presence.

But Steph herself had other ideas, and wouldn't stop badgering Mattie every time they got a few moments of silence in which they were meant to be completing the various work sheets McCloud was handing out. _All_ of her questions were about Clara and the Doctor, varying in how inappropriate they were, and Mattie managed not to answer a single one. She really couldn't start giving out personal information about them, and definitely not to this crude girl she barely knew. She'd rather everybody hated her than betray the Oswalds – she was still indescribably grateful they'd opened their home and arms to her so warmly after the summer's tragedies, and as well as that, she'd known them her entire life. They were among the circle she used to refer to her as her aunts and uncles, her extended family, everyone from the old days of the TARDIS before she was born. Well, everyone save for Jenny, whom she'd always called her cousin for whatever reason.

"I'm not going tell you stuff about them," Mattie said firmly as the lesson drew to a close and she was a small percentage more knowledgeable about the mysteries of the universe than she had been an hour ago, "It's rude. To them."

"But they're my form tutors, so they're basically _in loco parentis_. Do you understand what that means?" Steph persisted, picking up her bag as the bell signalling the end of the day ran, "It means they basically _are_ my parents. They're the closest thing I've got!"

"Apart from your actual parents, you mean?" the tall boy Mattie often saw in Steph's company interrupted, approaching and apparently leaving his other friends behind.

" _Zamknij się, Jakub_ ," Steph snapped at him. Mattie hadn't a clue what she'd just said or in what language.

" _Bądź miły_ ," he said smoothly, "Sorry about her. Is she being annoying?"

"Don't talk to him," Steph continued, "He has to ruin everything."

"She's new, you're gonna traumatise her," he continued.

"I am not. Are you traumatised, Matilda?"

"A bit."

"Wow! Do you see what you've done, Jake? Poisoned her against me."

"You poison everybody against yourself," he said. Mattie realised they must be related; there was a passing resemblance between them, the same pale skin, face shape and eye colour, even if Steph _did_ bleach her hair. And they were both speaking whatever language it had been. "We're gonna miss our train, hurry up." Steph glared at him but followed. Aki remained her usual quiet self, hanging around behind Matilda while Matilda was itching to get away. The rainstorm continued to wail outside, and she didn't want to risk opening an umbrella in it.

"Are you walking home?" Steph went back to what she'd been doing all lesson: bothering Mattie.

"I, uh… no… I'm getting a lift…"

Her eyes lit up like Christmas morning, " _Really_? Where do you live? Maybe you live near us – you could give me and Jake a lift."

"A lift? With who?"

"With the Hotswalds," Steph explained.

"You've got to leave them alone, they'll boot you into another form," he warned, "They've done it before when people are arseholes to them."

"Fuck you. I'm not an arsehole."

"Why're they giving you a lift?" Jake (she thought that was his name) asked.

"She lives with them. They're her legal guardians. It's crazy," Steph said. "Could you imagine?"

"That's cool," he said, "They're alright. For teachers."

"They're more than alright, they're the best teachers in this entire, shit school," said Steph, as they all moved towards the exit. It was worryingly easy to forget that Aki was even there. "Can't I get your number at least, Mattie?"

" _Mine_? Well-"

"Stop bothering her," Jake shook his head, "This is why everyone dumps you." Steph elbowed him, which was very easy to do in the crush of students all rushing to escape the confines of the building. Mattie had half a mind to wait an extra ten minutes at the end of the day for the corridors to empty out a little, just to avoid all this chaos.

"Really, though, where do you live?"

"That's the hundredth time you've asked me where I live today," Mattie said, "And I still won't tell you."

"We live in Hanover. Do you live near Hanover?"

"Not particularly," said Mattie truthfully, "So you definitely won't be offered a lift." That was less truthful, Clara liked driving and probably _wouldn't_ mind trekking all the way to Hanover – though, maybe not with unruly students of hers in tow.

Once they finally burst forth through the front doors they were assailed from all sides by the tremendous storm, battered and pelted by rain drops the size of bullets.

"I'll talk to you later?" Mattie said to Aki, who only nodded.

"Can't I come for dinner? We could have a sleepover, like kids do?" Steph continued to suggest.

"I tell you what – I'll ask, but I guarantee the answer is 'no,'" said Matilda, then she finally cut out of the crowd to slip around the other side of the building to go towards the staff carpark. Finally free of teenagers, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and walked straight into the rain. And then somebody grabbed her shoulders from behind and scared the crap out of her.

"Boo!"

Mattie jumped. It was Clara, and she proceeded to hold up her hand and telekinetically block the rain from hitting them; typically, both she and the Doctor – who trailed behind her carrying their books – were bone-dry.

" _Why_ would you do that?"

"Funny?" Clara suggested, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she said, "I'm cold."

"Well, I'll put the heating on when we get home," Clara smiled, taking her car keys out of her jacket pocket and aiming them at the bright-blue, rain-streaked Volkswagen at the edge of the staff lot. It was a relief to get in the van and out of the poor weather. It was meant to become a thunder storm by five o'clock that evening, the forecasts said.

"Do you know Steph Kaczmarek?" Mattie asked once Clara had started the engine and begun driving the three of them home, leaning forwards over the front seats so she didn't find herself alienated from the conversation.

"Yes," said Clara, "She's in our form. Why?"

"Do you know she fancies you?" The Doctor laughed, but Clara just sighed.

"I'm very aware of it, yes."

"It's hard not to be," said the Doctor.

"She's in my science and maths lessons," said Mattie, "She found out I live with you. So now everyone will probably find out."

"Were you hiding it?" Clara was surprised.

"Well, no, not _hiding_ it…"

"What's the matter? Are you ashamed of us?" the Doctor asked.

"Not _you_."

"Just Clara? I get that," she nodded understandingly.

"Hey!" Clara protested.

"What? You think I like people knowing _I_ live with you?"

"We're married."

"And I wish you wouldn't advertise it – it's embarrassing enough being associated with you," she said. In retaliation for that, Clara switched on the old-fashioned tape-deck and a song started to blast halfway through; it was right where it had been stopped after they'd arrived that morning.

"Why do you listen to all this weird, old music?" Mattie questioned.

" _The whole scene is obscene, time will strip it away, a year and a day_ ," the tape-deck crackled.

"This isn't an old song, it's The Libertines," Clara said.

"It's from 2002," said the Doctor, "Sixty years ago."

"All you listen to is…"

"Garage rock," the Doctor answered.

"Yeah, that."

"Well, when you get a car of your own and chauffeur _us_ around, you're more than welcome to put whatever weird music the 'kids today' listen to," Clara told her curtly, "Though, for the record, none of the tapes are mine – so you'd be better off rowing with the Doctor."

"It's an _Inbetweeners_ mixtape, get out of my life," the Doctor snapped at her. Clara shook her head.

"You two are living in the past."

"We'll take you there someday," the Doctor promised her, "Show you what London-town suburbia looked like when your parents grew up. 2005 – I can practically smell the looming financial crisis on the air. Congestion charge, smoking ban, underpasses and phone boxes that smell of wee. All the stuff that makes the turn of the century so… pungent. Tube TVs. PlayStation 2. Britney Spears. Can't you feel the vibes?"

"Your vibes sound notably eclectic."

"Nah, she's bang on," said Clara.

"Oyster cards, ringtones. The Euro. Blackberries."

"I had a Blackberry," said Clara.

"That's my point."

"All sounds old and depressing," said Mattie.

"Is Steph bothering you? I'll tell her off if she is," Clara changed the subject.

"She'd probably enjoy it. She's _really_ obsessed with you, keeps asking me for your phone number."

"You didn't give her it, did you?" Clara asked.

"No! Of course not. But – it's borderline stalking."

"Just try and ignore her, she's not so bad," Clara said.

"Isn't she?"

"No," Clara said firmly. "Besides, she reminds me a lot of me, when I was her age. I worry about her."

"You worry about everybody, Coo," Thirteen said. They pulled up to a red traffic light and the car stopped while the songs continued – they all sounded identical, and like they were being played inside a tin can. The Doctor was enjoying them, though, tapping her hands on the dashboard to what little rhythm Matilda could detect.

"…I almost got a detention."

"What? Who from? What did you do?" Clara asked quickly, the Doctor turning in the passenger seat to scrutinise Matilda directly.

"Nothing, I didn't do anything," she argued, "It was from Pickman."

"Sarah?"

"I left lunch early, and outside form she started having a go at me and said she thought I was up to something. She thought it was something to do with you. Then she told me I have an attitude for asking questions, and almost got me to stay behind after school."

" _That's_ unprofessional," the Doctor muttered.

"Sarah's just upset today, sweetheart," Clara explained. "Her cats have both gone missing, Louis and Marie."

"Awful names," the Doctor said, "Way to romanticise the villainous bourgeoisie. It's like everybody's forgotten about the guillotines."

"They're cats. Not reincarnations of the actual French aristocracy."

"They might be."

"Well, whatever – they're _cats_ , and they're missing, so she's upset. I wouldn't read anything into her snapping at you, Matts. She's unprofessional, like the Doctor said, but it's not to do with you personally."

"She still hasn't talked to us about drugs."

"Don't do any drugs," Clara said firmly, pushing the accelerator, "Or we'll kick you out."

"Would you?"

"Well… no, probably not, we'd try to help you break the habit and resolve your issues. But don't do any drugs."

"I mean, I'll try, but I can't make any promises."

"That's all we can ask," said the Doctor.

"Would you ever kick me out?"

"Probably not," said Clara, "Unless you came out as gay. Not having any gays under my roof."

"We'd kick you out if you adopted right-wing politics," said Thirteen.

"Really? So if I say, like, I hate poor people, you'd get rid of me?"

"You'd be out on the streets. Homeless."

"Wouldn't that make _you_ right-wing? If you're contributing to homelessness?"

"You'd deserve it," said Clara, "I'd back her up."

* * *

"Does Steph really remind you of you?" Mattie asked a solid three hours later, after she'd already been made to help the Doctor chop up chicken and vegetables to make fajitas. Clara, of course, hadn't done a thing to help – though, the Doctor said that Clara staying as far away from the kitchen as possible was a help in and of itself. But Rose Tyler had decided she was joining them for dinner that evening, showing up on the doorstep with a load of chocolate she'd managed to 'find' somewhere on the TARDIS. Clara and the Doctor were more than happy to take the chocolate in exchange for a seat at the table – and the Doctor always seemed to make too much food, anyway.

"Who's Steph?" Rose interrupted.

"This girl at school," Mattie explained, "She fancies Clara." Rose rolled her eyes, biting into her fajita wrap.

"She's very chaotic and sleeps around," Clara said, "And is very obvious about it. I was the same, until the Doctor made an honest woman out of me."

"Credit where credit's due," said Thirteen.

"Is that boy related to her?" Mattie continued.

"Jakub?" asked the Doctor. Mattie nodded. "They're twins."

"They were talking to each other in a different language."

"They're Polish."

"Everyone seems to be bilingual except me…" Matilda complained, glumly returning to her fajita.

"That's because you're English," Rose told her, "Everyone knows English people can only speak English. It's why everyone else hates us."

"And because of imperialism," the Doctor added, "And colonisation, slavery, genocide, theft, destroying foreign cultures under the guise of trying to 'civilise' them."

"Keep it in the classroom, you'll bore me to death," Rose said with her mouth full. "What were we talking about before? How Clara likes schoolgirls?"

Clara dropped her fajita on her plate, "I do not," she declared firmly, horrified. "I'm married to someone significantly older than me. And she even looks older than me."

"What? No I don't," Thirteen argued, " _You're_ the old one."

"I think you look about the same," Mattie shrugged.

"Yeah, but, what about Ashildr? She's, what, sixteen? And you slept with her," said Rose.

"You slept with a sixteen-year-old!?" Mattie exclaimed.

"No! First of all, Ashildr is immortal, she only _looks_ young; second of all, she was made immortal by Old Twelvey when she was _eight_ een, not sixteen; and third of all, _I_ never had anything to do with her, it was Ravenwood who went out with her. Which she's now forgotten, because of… reasons," Clara argued.

"Clara Ravenwood got with a girl who looks eighteen?" Mattie asked, "You really _are_ like Steph…"

"Even Jenny looks _quite_ young, wouldn't you say?" Rose joked, "I reckon she could get away with pretending to be twenty."

"I suppose that's something you and Jenny _don't_ have in common, then," Clara quipped.

"Excuse me? Are you saying I don't look twenty?" Clara shrugged. "I could if I wanted, you know. I control the universe. I can change my age at will."

"Then why don't you change it to something a bit more flattering?"

Rose scoffed and faltered, but was rendered unable to think of anything additional to say as a retort, "Well… piss off, Clara." Clara smiled smugly as she went back to eating her food. Rose shook her head. "Anyway. Matts. Has your first week been going okay? Do you have any friends?"

"I have this friend who likes Esther," Mattie said.

"Esther?" Rose frowned.

"The Lightning Girl, I mean. She draws these comic book style pictures of her, I keep trying to get her to send me them so I can show Esther. She'd think they were cool. She's Japanese."

"Who? Esther?"

"Of course not Esther, why would you think Esther was Japanese?" the Doctor asked.

"It was just the way she phrased it, I don't know… you skived any lessons yet?"

"No. Can you do that?"

" _No_ ," said Clara firmly, "You must not skive lessons."

"You can definitely skive lessons, school's not really important."

"Maybe not for an unemployed space hobo with absolutely no aspirations. Don't skive, Mattie. I'll find out if you do, I know all your teachers. I see them in the staff room every day."

"I always used to skive lessons," Rose shrugged, "Me and my mate, Keisha. We'd always come in late because we'd be out clubbing the night before."

"How old were you?"

"Fourteen, fifteen," Rose shrugged.

"Isn't that illegal?"

"Mattie, laws are just made up by boring people."

"I agree, but don't listen to her," the Doctor advised, "You're not skipping school and going clubbing."

"Did you go to school with dad?" Mattie asked Rose.

"No, no. We didn't properly meet until he moved onto the Estate."

"Didn't he grow up there?"

"No. In Peckham, yeah, but not the Estate, about ten minutes away. He got a council flat, in, god…" she paused and leant back in her chair, thinking, "2004? Because… must have been about that, because I knew him properly for about a year before the Doctor showed up… he was twenty-one when we met, I was eighteen."

"I wonder what mum was like at school…"

"You could ask your aunt?" Clara suggested.

"Yeah," Rose nodded, "Tish'll love to talk to you about Martha. Why don't you ring her?"

"I'm not ringing her, she's basically deaf, she shouts down the phone."

"She's your family," said Clara, "We can take you to visit, if you want. She's only in London, we wouldn't even need the TARDIS."

"How are you a teacher if you didn't do any work at school?"

"What? I did loads of work," said Clara.

"But you said you used to sleep around, like Steph."

"I'm… organised. Have good time management."

"No whoring until _after_ she finishes her essays," Rose muttered, "You're a swot, you know."

"It's a… stress relief. I have hobbies, it's not a crime. Mattie doesn't want to listen to this over dinner. You'd think you'd be bored of ripping into me after so long…"

"I think you two are, like, the real teenagers," Mattie decided, just about at the end of her fajita.

"I agree," said the Doctor.

"Growing up is a myth," said Clara, then she nodded at her wife, "Just look at her. She's a child. Can't take my eyes off her half the time."

"I didn't realise you had much of a desire to take your eyes off me, Coo."

Rose made a retching noise, "I'm trying to eat here. You're gonna traumatise Matts if you carry on like that. She'll need therapy."

"I would like to go. Maybe," Mattie said suddenly.

"Go where?" Clara asked, "To therapy?"

"Well, you said early, back to… when mum and dad grew up."

"Go clubbing," said Rose.

"We're not taking her clubbing," Clara told Rose.

"Can we go clubbing, then? We could take Sally."

"You don't even _like_ Sally. And you're eighty, aren't you a bit old to be throwing up sambuca in a dirty toilet while The Black Eyed Peas plays in the next room?"

"You sound familiar with the lifestyle."

"Nope, while you were throwing up, _I_ was getting off with drunk boys and girls."

"Contracting STDs."

"But at least I wasn't the sad-case puking in the next cubicle."

"Matilda," the Doctor began very seriously, leaning towards her, "I can only stress how important it is that you never look up to either of these two women as role models. Your parents were always the most sensible and adult of us all. Any second, they're gonna start pulling each other's hair."

"I wouldn't pull her hair," said Rose, "She'd get too excited." Clara winked at her, and Rose grimaced.

"What a nice example you're both setting for an impressionable, young girl."

"I'm not impressionable," Mattie said.

"I sure hope not, else we'll have hell to pay when you start following in their footsteps. Lemme tell you, we don't have the cash to bail you out of jail if the cops pick you up for underage drinking – or worse," the Doctor advised her.

"Well, I promise not to start getting arrested until I can afford my own bail."

"That's the spirit. Now, who's for the news? I hear Esther gave a statement to the BBC about that car bomb she defused."


	16. Invasive Species - Chapter 4

_Invasive Species_

 _4_

"A gift, for your trouble," the Doctor set a piping hot cup of coffee down in front of a very woozy Clara, her eyes still sticky from tired; she didn't think she'd washed her face properly. Just driving them into work had been more of a chore than usual. Forgetting where they were for half a second (the staff room) Clara instinctively kissed the Doctor's cheek once she'd sat back down in the next seat. Luckily, they weren't in a room with Rose Tyler, so it didn't matter all that much. Everyone else was focused on how unhappy they were to be there as well.

They'd been up at quarter-to-six that morning by Ida, Moore's secretary, summoning them to the school promptly for half-past-seven, because the police needed to talk to the teachers. She herself felt like death, and Sarah wasn't faring much better; she kept sniffing, sick with worry over the fate of her missing cats.

"I love you," Clara murmured as quietly as she could to the Doctor, grateful for the caffeine. Not quietly enough, though, because Kyle – who was poorly trying to comfort Sarah by telling her it was statistically unlikely that both Louis and Marie had been run over – decided it was the right time to stick his nose right in their business.

"Is that really appropriate for school hours?" he snapped.

"It's seven-thirty," the Doctor matched his tone, "We're not in school hours."

"Just because _you're_ a prude doesn't mean the rest of us are," Clara said.

"Maybe you'd get more sleep if you paced yourselves a little," he quipped, noticing how exhausted Clara was.

"What would be the fun in that?" she sipped her coffee.

Moore, preceded by Ida, entered the staff room, rammed full with the entire faculty. Behind them was a pair of police officers. What little chatter there was cut out immediately. The Doctor shifted uncomfortably next to Clara; for some reason, she got especially anxious around the police, always worried she was going to be arrested for something. Then again, she did get arrested more often than most. She started bouncing her foot up and down, agitated, and Clara was forced to hold her hand to stop her from looking so guilty.

"Morning. I'm DC Anderson, sorry for getting you all up so early," the 'main one' cleared his throat before speaking, sounding like he was at the tail end of a nasty cough. He had a tissue balled up in one of his hands. "We'd just like to make you aware we're in the middle of a missing persons epidemic-" Questions were launched at the detective from all angles. Clara was shocked, she thought they'd just be there to warn them about the Manifest drug again.

"Could we all treat Detective Anderson with a little more respect, please?" Moore called loudly over them, "This is a very serious matter."

"There's been an enormous increase in missing person reports over the last week, and multiple reports of children from this school. Normally we'd come in and interview teachers about anything that could cause a child to run away, or if they'd been acting strangely, but we've been overrun."

"Is it just kids?" the Doctor interrupted, letting go of Clara's hand and leaning on the table in front of them.

"No. There's an increase in every age group and ethnicity. And missing animals, too." Sarah let out a small sob when he said that. "We're only here to warn you to make sure the children are aware, before they see the bulletins on the news later this evening and get scared. It'll sound best coming from their teachers first, we don't want any scaremongering."

"What are we supposed to tell them?" asked Jeremy Wu, "Don't go missing?"

"This is no laughing matter, Mr Wu," Lorna snapped at him. "Beginning next week, we're going to start chaperoning them on the buses. You'll be up first."

"What if _I_ go missing?"

"We'll have a party," Cameron McCloud muttered from elsewhere.

"Are you all quite finished?" Moore asked. Silence. She indicated for Anderson to continue.

"Like I was saying, the increase is across all demographics. So you should all be especially careful, too. Don't worry, the police are doing the best we can, this will all be resolved very soon. Are there any questions?" A dozen hands raised in the room. Anderson looked around and pretended not to see them. "No? Good. We've got three other schools to visit in the next hour, so if you'll excuse us…" He turned to leave, his PC companion in a high-vis vest following, while the teachers shouted after him with a myriad of objections.

"I hate cops," the Doctor grumbled next to Clara. "How have we not noticed that kids have been going missing?"

"There were a few who didn't show up to school yesterday," she said, "I was thinking about bringing up a truancy problem again…"

"My cats!" Sarah wept next to them, "What could have happened to them? They never even normally leave the garden…"

"I'm calling a whole-school assembly this morning, nine-fifteen. They'll go to class and you'll bring them to the main hall as soon as possible, and _I'll_ address the students," Moore said, then swept away with Ida at her heels.

"Great," Clara muttered, "And there's still over an hour before school actually begins…"

"That's the trouble with cops," said the Doctor, "They think they're better than you. The feds never tell anybody a damn thing."

"…I should go home," Clara said, thinking, then turned to ask her wife, "Do you want to get breakfast?" They hadn't had time to eat since they'd been rushed out early for this irritatingly short bulletin.

"Home?"

"I mean – for Matts. We should drive her. Don't you think?"

"Oh. Sure, yeah. Do we have time?"

"Just go," Sarah said next to them, sniffing, "I'll let you know if you miss anything."

"We'll bring you a coffee," Clara promised as she went about re-gathering her things. She felt it was the least she could do for Sarah not making a fuss about them disappearing that morning – and while she was so upset about her cats. They rushed out after that, lest they be forced to go on a coffee run for half the teaching staff. And because Clara was trying to avoid Tom because she knew he was going to harangue her to ask questions about war poets at the next opportunity, and she thought it was too early to talk about war poets. Even if it was one of the few areas of literature they _didn't_ bicker about – as much.

They took a detour, however, down to the arts block. The English department was closest to the main building, right through a set of double doors, as one of the three core subjects. After that came the Humanities rooms, split amongst History and RE, and then Geography and Politics around another corner. Clara rarely strayed all the way down _there_ , though, she only ever went as far as the Doctor's classroom. She ducked into her office so that they could leave their things behind down there, the Doctor going to her own room.

After dumping her things on the desk, which was just her laptop and a selection of books she'd taken home to re-read and annotate, she paused to look around the room. The sun was just coming up outside, making the room a shade of pink. She had a few things of the Doctor's in there, which she left in the office because the office door could be locked but the classroom door couldn't, but aside from that it was still emptier than she would like.

"What do you think about it in here?" she asked once the Doctor returned, looking for her. "Does it seem empty?"

"I think it's fine. You're too used to being surrounded by my junk."

"It's _our_ junk," Clara corrected her, "Maybe you're right. Should I bring some more stuff? How about one of those old radios you've got?"

"Depends which radio," said the Doctor, who was very protective of her vintage audio equipment, which she collected for a reason Clara had never been able to understand. A week after she regenerated she'd found a Walkman somewhere on the TARDIS, and that was that; she still had it, in the house somewhere.

"I could get a new radio," Clara said.

"They don't sell radios anymore, they're all online."

"You're bumming me out."

"I'll find you a radio. Or take one of the record players and vinyls, then people'll think you're cool, like me." Clara doubted that.

"Tell you what I'll do, I'll go find that papier-mache TARDIS you made when you were making models for the space race. Put it on the windowsill. Or what about a plant?"

"You won't remember to water it."

"A fake one, then. For colour?" She put her coat back on and the Doctor held the office door open for her to leave. "You're supposed to be the savvy decorator," Clara reminded her, Thirteen the one who decided how _every_ room they inhabited looked. She decided the placement of all the furniture, the colours of the carpets, the paint, the upholstery – and she was really very good at it, so Clara just let her.

"It's _your_ office, Coo."

"And I like being reminded of _you_ when I'm in it."

"I'll see what knick-knacks I can dig out," she relented, "Anyway – where're we heading for breakfast?"

"Jesus, I don't know, it's not even eight in the morning… let's find a hotel," she suggested, "Hotel restaurants will be open by now, in chains."

"You want to find a hotel?"

"We're in Brighton, it's almost entirely made up of hotels."

"Well, sure, if you think we've got the time."

"It's that or McDonald's."

"If only we had a time machine, we could go somewhere and grab breakfast whenever, stay for as long as we liked…"

"Do you know what? There's that bakery down the road. Let's stop there instead," Clara decided. The Doctor was indifferent, though Clara knew she would be all for it if she _did_ decide to bother Jenny and get her to bring the TARDIS down to whisk them away for breakfast somewhere. "I'll call Matts and see if she wants anything. Bacon sandwich, or something. And make sure she doesn't leave without us…"

Clara did just that as they continued their hasty return to the Westfalia, but she had to call three times for Matilda – who was still asleep – to actually answer, which she did very woozily. Clara would be lying if she hadn't thought for one fleeting second that Mattie might have gone missing in the night, but no, she was just a heavy sleeper. After Clara chastised her for still being asleep at that time of the morning (though they usually left her to get up of her own accord), she finally managed to acquire both a breakfast order and a promise that she'd wait for them to take her to school.

"Do you think we should do something?" Clara asked the Doctor, who'd sunk deep into her thoughts since Clara had started fumbling with her phone, while she went about starting the engine.

"Hmm?"

"People going missing en masse, sweetheart," she implored, "Shouldn't we look into it?"

"I'm thinking about it…" The Doctor usually jumped at the opportunity to investigate something strange. "The issue is, it sounds like they're disappearing from all across Brighton, which is a lot stranger than, I don't know, standard alien abductions or kidnappings… and there's no hysteria."

"What about the meteor shower?" Clara suggested, "What was it about it that you thought was strange?"

"Just… the colours seemed different. But maybe you have a point… I don't know. I'll have Helix scan. Maybe talk to Jenny, depends what they say on the news tonight."

"Here I thought you'd suggest we skip school and break into the police station to see what they have to say."

"You know I'd love to, but I don't want to get arrested when I actually have to _live_ in the same city. Better stay out of the pig-pen."

"Charming. But that's your verdict? Wait and see?"

"We don't even know where they've gone missing from," she said, "Try not to think about it, I'll work on it. Talk to Helix, like I said, okay?"

"…Alright, but…"

"But what?"

"I'm worried, too. If you find something, you'll tell me, right? You won't go off on your own?"

"Of course not. Just try to put it out of your mind for now, Coo."

* * *

"I don't get it, miss."

"Get what, Steph?" Clara asked with a sigh later that Friday afternoon. There wasn't too long to go until the end of the lesson and school day, so she wasn't too concerned about it being derailed by more questions. The same questions she'd been fielding since Moore's ominous assembly that morning warning the student body about an increased risk of them being kidnapped. Though, she would certainly rather answer questions about _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , which was what they were supposed to be doing.

"Like, what are we supposed to do to _not_ get kidnapped?" Steph persisted. She was very much looking forward to _not_ having to listen to Steph's incessant questions and kept eyeing the clock. Everybody else just let her talk, thinking Clara utterly oblivious to the fact it was a scheme to get them out of doing more work. The same trick that had been pulled in schools for centuries.

"The police weren't particularly forthcoming with any advice this morning," Clara explained wearily, "Just watch the news later tonight, they said there'd be something on the news."

"So you're not worried about it? Us?"

"Too busy worrying about myself, it's not just schoolkids. It's everybody who's vanishing."

"They should cancel school," Steph said.

"You'd miss your English lessons if they did that," Clara pointed out, which shut her up. She was very aware of how Steph _never_ missed an English lesson; it was one of the few subjects she'd never skived, being in Clara's class the previous year, too. She had a mark next to her name on the online register that informed teachers Steph was a known truant, often skipping Maths lessons. "Look, the police didn't tell us anything. They didn't say where people are going missing from, if they have any suspects we should warn you about, nothing. We're all in the dark. Miss Pickman's cats have even disappeared."

"I'd disappear if I had to live with Miss Pickman," said a boy at the back of the classroom, Sam.

"I'll tell her to set you some extra homework this week, then, shall I?" Clara threatened, which caused about as many sniggers as his joke about Sarah had done to begin with. "I understand you're all scared, but the police are doing everything they can." She thought they probably _were_ doing everything they could, too, but she wasn't convinced about how much that was.

"Maybe we should be escorted home?" Steph suggested, "Like, by teachers." Clara knew exactly what that meant, because she wasn't born yesterday.

"Not in our contracts."

"But you're _in loco parentis_."

"While you're in school we are, not when you're out there. Just don't go out late or on your own. And _watch the news_."

"Like Boo Radley?"

"Exactly, Hannah," Clara said, surprised at Hannah speaking up since she'd been so heartbroken after being publicly dumped by Steph herself the day before. Steph had now started attaching herself to her brother's friends again. "Just… become shut-ins. Until the police sort everything out."

"What if there's a serial killer?" Steph asked.

"No serial killer could kidnap so many people so quickly," Clara said, like that was somehow supposed to be a comfort to them.

"Could be a gang of serial killers. Or aliens, abducting people."

"Haven't seen any flying saucers," Clara said, trying to pretend like alien abductions weren't also _her_ top theory, certainly higher than a gang of marauding Jack the Ripper copycats stalking the streets of Brighton.

"There was that meteor shower," Jakub said. He was normally quite quiet, practically mute compared to his sister, and often only spoke when he had something to say. Again, though, Clara was also concerned with the meteor shower. But if Helix was looking into it at home, since he was integrated into the house as a sort of family PA (the same role he played on the TARDIS), then Clara didn't know what more _she_ could do. Maybe she would talk to Esther about it, see if she had heard anything. Even the Lightning Girl wasn't too big for missing people, she'd always been down-to-earth.

"I'm telling you, try not to think about it," Clara implored, "If your parents, or the police, suggest a curfew – do your best to listen to it, too." There were groans of annoyance throughout the room. "I know, you all hate the idea of a curfew, you're all probably escape artists who could get out of one easily, but people are only worried about you. You don't want your parents to be worried sick about you, right?"

"They wouldn't notice," Steph said. Jakub kicked her from two seats away.

"Hey!" Clara said, "No fighting in my classroom. Just because you're siblings doesn't mean you get a pass for mindless violence, not around me, anyway." The minute-hand finally struck three-thirty, and the bell rang loudly. They began putting their things in their bags and Clara sat up in her chair, "You know what I want you all to do? Over the weekend, while you're thinking about how to stay safe from those Bob Ewell types out there, write a paragraph _each_ – a third of a page – about how you think Boo Radley felt when he decided to intervene with the attack after the pageant. Where was he, what did he see, what was the moment when he knew he _couldn't_ stand by and watch? Anyone who doesn't do it for Tuesday will have to do it again for Wednesday, overnight, and a full page." They groaned again.

"That's not fair, miss," somebody complained.

"Then you'd better do it the first time, hadn't you? De-mystifying Boo Radley will be a useful exercise in understanding the limitations of Scout as a narrator, which fits into what we're doing next week. And you'd better get to finishing the book if you didn't read it over summer," she warned loudly as they filed out of the room as quickly as possible, "I'll be able to tell if you haven't. It's _very_ easy to work out who's lying." It was, too, though they never believed her. "Could I have a word, Steph?" Steph would bend over backwards for 'a word' with Clara, and so she instantly u-turned on her way out of the room to appear promptly in front of Clara's desk while Clara closed her computer. She was aware of Jakub waiting outside to accompany his sister out of the school.

"Are you going to offer me a lift home? I don't think Hanover is _that_ far." Clara agreed, Hanover wasn't so far, but that certainly wasn't what she wanted. She crossed her arms sternly.

"I need to talk to you about boundaries," she said.

"What's a boundary?" Steph pretended to be oblivious, "You could teach me."

"That's exactly what I'm talking about. You really need to stop making inappropriate remarks, do you understand? I heard you were asking Matilda to give you my phone number."

"I can ask you personally if you want?"

" _Steph_ , I'm serious. I can have you moved out of my form and my classes in an instant, you know."

"Well – no – there's – I-"

"Listen, it's not really about pestering me, but I don't want you to…" Clara's eyes strayed to the doorway, where Jake still lurked, but now somebody else – Mattie. "Just bear it in mind. This is a classroom, I'm a teacher, and I'm sure Matilda can attest that being in Miss Pickman's form isn't nearly so interesting as me and my wife's." Steph grimaced, also spotting Matilda. "Or I could talk to Mrs Mueller, I'm sure she'd love to keep a close eye on you, stop you from skiving as many maths lessons. I'm also concerned about seeing Hannah crying in the hallways." Steph rolled her eyes.

"It was nothing."

"I heard what happened, it wasn't very nice. Next time you dump someone, could you try and spare them the public humiliation?" Steph glared at her, and Clara didn't wait for a response. "Fine… Go home, and you and Jake make sure you're careful this weekend, okay? I'd hate to see anybody in my form on the missing posters." She let Steph leave, joining Jake in the corridor.

"Your step-mum has it in for me," she said to Mattie on her way past.

"She's not my step-mum, and you know Hannah had a go at me earlier? I didn't even do anything," Mattie argued back, "I don't even know either of you."

"You can get to know me, if you want."

"We're leaving, we have to catch the train," Jake decided, grabbing her arm and dragging her away finally. Mattie watched them go while Clara continued gathering her things.

"Why is Hannah Beckett angry with you?" Clara asked once they were out of earshot. The Doctor was supposed to come and meet them at Clara's classroom, which was closer to the exit, so they were just there waiting for the time being.

"Um…"

"Matts…"

"How much did you hear about the thing with Steph and Hannah?"

"I heard that Steph broke up with her very loudly in the canteen."

"Yeah…"

"Why?"

"Well, it was sort of… she did that and then told Hannah that _I_ was her new girlfriend. And then I ran away, to form, early. So now they all hate me."

"Right… just to check, you're definitely not going out with Steph, right? Because she's a terrible first girlfriend, trust me, I was her once," Clara said.

"No! I'm not even gay, sorry to disappoint you, 'step-mum.'"

"Ha, ha. I'd just worry about you getting the same treatment as Hannah. Who wants to be publicly dumped? Poor girl… look, she'll get over it, she's young, I wouldn't worry."

"I wasn't."

"Well… good."

"Are you saying you'd disapprove if I did go out with her? Say, if I liked girls, and fell for her plays, you'd, like, ban me?" Mattie questioned wryly.

"I'd disapprove, but it's your life. Besides, at least Steph couldn't get you pregnant – an alien, Manifest teen pregnancy is the last thing we need," Clara sighed, "Why? Who're you thinking of going out with?"

"I'm not, I just wanted to know what you'd do."

"Lock you in your bedroom and board up the windows."

"Whose bedroom are we boarding up?" the Doctor stuck her head around the doorway while the last trickle of students walked past, all intent on getting out of the building as quickly as humanly possible.

"Matilda's, if she gets a boyfriend."

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"No, I don't even know any boys," Mattie said.

"Well, keep it that way, I don't like boys in the house," said the Doctor, "Except Adam Mitchell, but he doesn't really count as a boy, y'know?"

"Why don't you like boys in the house?"

"I don't know," she shrugged, "They're just everywhere. You can get tired of them so easily. I've always preferred hanging out with girls."

"Anyway, Matts, in all seriousness, you know you if you get a boyfriend, you can ask me _any_ questions about contraception-" Mattie stopped Clara _very_ quickly when she brought that up.

"You don't have to say anything else, please, I'll die of embarrassment, I'm never going to talk to a boy, okay? Are you happy now?"

"As long as _you're_ happy," Clara smiled at her on their way out. "Really, though, if you ever decide you want to go on the pill-"

"Stop talking! I'm only fifteen, I'm a child."

"Oh, _now_ you're a child?" Clara quipped, when Matilda spent half her time reminding them she was technically fifty. She could change her age on a whim for whenever it suited her. "Safe sex is no joke."

"You know what else isn't a joke? Teen suicide. And that's where I'm heading if this conversation continues."

"Don't say things like that, Matts; you sound like my sister."

"It _is_ National Suicide Prevention Month," the Doctor said knowingly, "If Mattie wants to talk about teen suicide, we've got all those helpline phone numbers."

"She doesn't need any helplines, she can talk to us," said Clara, shaking her head, "You do know you can talk to us if you ever feel depressed, don't you?"

"Yes, Clara," Matilda said boredly, "If I ever plan on killing myself, I'll let you know beforehand."

"You're just like your mother sometimes," said the Doctor, though Mattie couldn't quite work out whether that was a compliment, "With that sarcasm."

On their way out of the building they found their route blocked, however, by the boy's football team hanging around near the PE changing rooms, which were just down the corridor from the school's back door (which led to the staff carpark and the van.) Clara was surprised; shouldn't the football team be getting changed, or playing football? Instead, they were moping near the windows. Then Terrance Baxter forced his way back into the building – after trying to push a pull door and walking flat into it, to some laughter – in a sour mood.

"Might as well go home," he told the boys, "The situation with the pitch is too bad. Won't be any practice until it gets sorted." They all groaned unanimously, "Just go down the bloody park, or something. You've got footballs, haven't you? Do that, then."

"We're supposed to be _encouraging_ ," a woman behind Clara, the Doctor and Mattie said, walking around them. Magda Sokolov, the girls' PE teacher; Magda and Terry didn't get along at all, mainly because Magda did her work, and Terry was a lazy old fart.

"What's going on?" Clara asked as the boys picked up their bags and started meandering out of the building, one carrying a football.

"There's an issue with the pitch, I've just been on the phone about it," Magda explained.

"And issue? It's a freak of nature, more like," Terry grumbled, "It's covered in grass."

"It's a football pitch," said Clara dryly, "It's supposed to have grass."

"Overgrown," Magda explained, "It's covered in roots, you can't walk across it without tripping. I've called some landscapers, they'll be here next week; god knows how I'm going to convince Moore to pay for the invoice with the school's budget…"

"Lorna believes the sports facilities are important, I'm sure she'll pay for this with the school's money," said Clara, "But… people were doing PE yesterday, weren't they? Didn't you have PE yesterday, Matts?"

Mattie was distracted by something the Doctor was saying to her, "Hmm?"

"PE. Yesterday."

"Oh. What about it?"

Clara rolled her eyes, "Never mind…"

"Matilda's class were in the gym," said Magda, but grew confused, "Sorry, is she your…?"

"Ward," said Clara, "Sort of… we're her guardians."

"You've adopted a teenager? Why would you do that to yourself?" Terry jibed.

"It's complicated."

"I hate kids…" he grumbled.

"You're a teacher," Magda pointed out.

"So? I'll be a championship manager one day." Clara doubted that, he was at least forty already. "I was telling Sarah about it yesterday."

"I don't know why you waste your time with her," Magda said, regressing to idle gossip now that there weren't any kids within earshot (save for Matilda). "She doesn't like you. She thinks you're disgusting, just like the rest of us." Terry being the teacher who had been caught engaging in 'inappropriate activities' with a dinner lady in the sports supply room. The dinner lady had been let go, but somehow, Terry's job remained intact.

"Nah," he shrugged, "She likes me more than Chapel."

"I think you're both arseholes," Magda said, "And so does Sarah. And _she's_ not great herself."

"She's decent," Clara said in meagre defence of her closest friend on the faculty, excluding her wife, "She let us carpool with her in spring."

"Yeah, well, while you lot stay here chin-wagging, _I've_ got a date," Terry announced smugly, "Going down Lazer Bowl."

"What? Now?" Clara asked, "You've got a date to go Lazer Bowl at four in the afternoon?"

"She can't go later, she works nights," he said, "She's a stripper. Sapphire. Give her my name, she might just let you have a touch," he winked, addressing this almost entirely towards Clara.

"Charming," she said, "But I've had my fair share of strippers."

"Excuse me?" the Doctor interrupted, distracted for just long enough for Matilda to seize victory in what looked to be a very intense thumb war; they'd been playing for a minute or so behind Clara's back.

"Terry's going Lazer Bowl with a stripper," Clara explained.

"That's so cool! Why don't we go to Lazer Bowl?" the Doctor asked.

"Why aren't you a stripper?" Clara countered. The Doctor paused.

"I mean, I guess that's a valid question…"

"Can we go home yet?" Mattie asked, "I don't want to hear where this conversation is going. Remember what I was saying earlier? About teen suicide?"

"Sweetheart, I told you not to say that," Clara told her, "But yes, we should go. Don't want to make Terry late, after all."

"I'm gonna trounce her," Terry said proudly, "She's only got one arm." And then he swaggered off, very proud of himself.

"I almost want to go with him," said Magda once he'd left, "Where do you think he found a one-armed stripper who wants to go bowling?"

"God knows… right, then," Clara interrupted Mattie and the Doctor's thumb war rematch, "Let's go…" They left Magda – who presumably had some other business to attend to – behind in the school.

But alas, their odyssey towards the bright blue Volkswagen was only destined to be held up even more. She was aware of the Doctor questioning her about how she was now suddenly desperate to go play laser tag, and how she knew some enormous, intergalactic laser tag arena for 'pros' (which they certainly were not) over in a different star system, but Clara found herself blocking this out. After all, she could always take Jenny to play laser tag if she was that desperate, she was surely a match for any other competitors.

"Hey," Mattie touched Clara's arm and tugged on her to look a certain way, back towards the building.

"What?"

"What's going on over there?" Matilda pointed at a scene playing out behind the bike racks, now empty of nearly all the bikes but _not_ empty of school children, it seemed. And certainly not the most troubling one of all, because there was Steph and her most recent flame, Hannah Beckett, having some kind of argument. Hannah kept trying to leave, but Steph grabbed her arm to stop her.

"Nothing good, I'm sure," said Clara. They were too far away to hear anything. It looked like Hannah began to cry again.

"Shouldn't you do something?" Mattie asked, glancing between the Oswalds.

"They're just arguing, and we're outside of school hours," Clara said. "That kind of thing is… it's part of growing up, I guess. We all get into it every now and then."

"Really?" Mattie was unconvinced. In the blink of an eye, Steph tried to kiss Hannah, and got a very hard slap around the face for her trouble; _that_ they heard. Hannah stormed off while Steph nursed the side of her face. Then a second figure emerged, the taller shape of Jakub, who also wasn't happy with Steph. He very clearly started arguing with her, and she shouted right back, though it was mostly in Polish.

"Weren't they going to be late for the train home?" Mattie asked.

"I suppose that's what they're arguing about," said the Doctor, still watching, crossing her arms. She looked worried.

"…the shit we're going to get from mum and dad!" Jakub shouted loud enough for them to hear most of the words.

"Well, fuck off, then!" Steph yelled back at him.

" _Me_ fuck off!? I'm the only one you have to talk to!"

"You're not going to talk to me! You're just going to hang out with Sam, smoking weed, or whatever it is you do!" Jake didn't even bother to continue fighting, just turned on his heels and left Steph where she was, bag slung over his shoulder. "Jakub! Get back here!" Steph reverted to Polish again and went off in pursuit of him, right as he dropped a hoverboard he'd been carrying down onto the concrete and went off that way, skating faster than Steph could walk.

Clara sighed, "See? That's why I worry about her. It's exactly the kind of shit I used to get up to when mum died." She turned to go back towards the van.

"You're not even gonna check on her?" Mattie asked.

"And say what?"

"Well… well, fine, you do that," Mattie told them, " _I'm_ going to go see if she's alright, though. At least I'm not bound by whatever weird teacher code you two are living by." She took off away down the steps out of the staff carpark, towards the bike rack.

"She really _is_ just like Martha," she heard the Doctor say behind her.

It didn't take Mattie long to catch up with Steph, who was wandering out of the school gates now on her own, very few students left in the area.

"Steph? …Stefani!" She turned around, tears in her eyes, and stopped to wait. Mattie didn't quite know what she was going to say when she caught up to her, however. "…Sorry, I just… I saw what happened just now, with Hannah and then Jake…" Jake was already gone. "I have some tissues, I always carry tissues with me." She fumbled in her pockets and took out a packet of them, holding it for Steph, who took one meekly. Her demeanour seemed to have been shattered. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she muttered, "Why wouldn't I be?"

"You got hit in the face," Mattie reminded her.

"Why do you care?"

"I guess I just don't want to watch people be upset, although, I don't think I'm good at talking to them… or, like, consoling anybody…"

"You know, you're weird, Matilda," Steph said.

"I've heard that, is it bad?"

Steph sighed, "I suppose not. Look, I'm fine, you can just go back to your step-parents and get driven home to whatever wonderful house the Oswalds live in."

"They're not my step-parents," Mattie told her, "They're not even… they're just…"

"I don't want to hear it, really, I'm fine," Steph shook her head, "Anything I say you're just gonna tell them, anyway."

"What is there to tell?" Mattie implored, but Steph didn't care.

"Thanks for the tissue, Mattie, but I'm not interested in being spied on by my teachers," she turned to go.

"I'm not a grass," Mattie said, following her a little, "Look, you're…" Steph stopped to look at her again, "I don't know, one of the two people here who's talked to me. I've never really been to school before, so…"

"You've never been to school?"

"No, it's… I don't want to talk about that. Just – what's your phone number, I guess." Steph paused. "Or you could have mine? I have mine memorised."

"…Fine," she said eventually, taking out her phone so that Mattie could dictate her number. Better that than risk Steph stealing Clara's personal number from Matilda's contacts. "…I've got to go. I'll get yelled at if I'm late."

"Yeah, well, I'll see you next week, though?" Steph just nodded and then finally left, taking off to follow Jakub. Matilda felt useless, that she could have done something more – Steph was clearly upset, after all, and it didn't seem like it was related entirely to her botched attempt to apologise to Hannah. What had been the right thing to say?

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Thinking it was probably Clara asking what was going on, she took it out to check as she began her trudge back to the carpark.

It wasn't Clara, though; it was Aki, frantically texting her a bizarre mix of English and Japanese characters. Why was _everyone_ bilingual except for her? _Ugh_. Apparently, Aki's dog had gone missing and she wanted Matilda to come and help her look, somewhere near the seafront. When she finally returned to Clara and the Doctor, sitting in the front of the van and waiting for her while arguing about which ancient CD to listen to, her eyes were glued to her phone. She missed the door handle when she first reached for it.

"Aki's freaking out, her dog's gone missing," she said once she clambered into the long front seat, next to the Doctor.

"Aki? What about Steph?" the Doctor implored.

"She told me to piss off, I guess. A bit nicer than that, I don't know, she stormed off… Aki wants me to go to North Laine to help her. Where's North Laine?"

"Near the beach – you're not going, sorry," said Clara sternly, "And tell Aki not to look, either. The last thing we need is more people going missing…"

"Do you two just never act? You ignore these missing people, you won't go and see if Steph's okay, now you won't let me go help Aki, my only real friend-"

"Sweetheart," Clara cut her off as she started the engine, "We're trying our best."

"And we're not doing nothing," the Doctor added, "Helix is doing some scans."

"'Doing some scans'," Mattie repeated bitterly, "Of _course_ Helix is 'doing some scans'…"

"Hey, enough of the attitude," Clara told her off, though her tone of voice was quite soft, sympathetic.

"We will do whatever is in our power to do, okay?" the Doctor said, "I don't like standing by while bad things happen, either. But… with Steph, there are professional boundaries. How does it look if some teachers everybody knows she's infatuated with start comforting outside of school hours? I'll tell you how it looks; like grooming. There are situations we can't intervene in."

"Fine, fine…"

"And the dog is for your own safety. You can't go out in the night, just the two of you, wandering the streets looking for a lost dog, Mattie," the Doctor continued, "I'd love to, but this is bigger than one dog. We need a… plan of action. More information. A little more, at least. Look, I don't stand down when people are in trouble, I never have, and I never will."

"She's right," Clara nodded, "We're not sitting by and doing nothing. Do you know why I have this scar?" Mattie glanced at it when prompted, though she truthfully never thought much of it; she'd never known Clara _without_ her scarred left arm, it had always been like that.

"No, you've never really told me." It had something vaguely to do with Esther, a long time ago, that was all Matilda knew.

"To remind me _not_ to sit by and do nothing. I don't like looking at all this, either." She lifted one of her hands from the steering wheel to point vaguely at the streets as they passed, which was only when Mattie realised they were surrounded, on all sides, by missing posters. Fences, lampposts, people's front doors, shop windows; the streets were lined up and down with the bleak images of happy pets, happy children, happy people, all of them now vanished. It surely wasn't flying saucers and little green men doing this, or they would have noticed.

"Aki asked me about it."

"Hm?"

"Your scar – she asked me if I knew how you got it."

"Oh. It's not a nice story. I'll tell you one day, I'm sure, it's just… not very fun to tell. But the story we tell people at school is that it was an incident with some faulty wiring when I was a toddler and I hardly remember a thing, okay?"

"…Okay…" said Matilda. She wanted to know now, but it seemed like it was unpleasantly similar to the other wound-related stories of her non-blood family, like the story she'd never heard about what happened to Jenny's thumb, or how Oswin lost her leg, or why the Doctor sometimes got confused and called her 'Martha' without realising. She'd gotten in the habit of believing that they were things she wouldn't like to hear about a very long time ago. After all, it was a very large scar, covering the length of Clara's entire left arm with the worst patch of shiny, damaged tissue around her wrist; it was surely the result of nothing nice.

"I've seen something like this happen before, you know," the Doctor began after a lapse in the conversation, "People going missing without a trace. Well, I say before, missing people is a pretty frequent harbinger of doom. But it was with Rose, a very long time ago – when we went to the Olympics, in London."

"Did you go to the Olympics?" Mattie asked.

"I totally carried the torch and lit the big flame!" the Doctor said proudly, beaming at her, "It'll be on YouTube somewhere. In among all the weird homages to Shakespeare and the British Empire. Not that the British Empire is worth remembering in any context outside of its position as one of the most violent and genocidal oligarchies in human history…"

"Get to your story, sweetheart," Clara prompted.

"Oh, right, well, these kids were disappearing, all in this one neighbourhood. This totally ordinary street, you'd think nothing of it, just suburban London in its prime."

"But what was happening?" Mattie asked.

"There was this alien, an Isolus, looks a little bit like a cross between a floating flower and a jellyfish. And the thing about them is they travel, all the Isolus kids, through space together on solar winds. _Billions_ of them, but this one – still only a child – got lost, and its pod landed on this street on Earth. So it was stranded, and it took possession of this girl, Chloe, and she started, well… sort of, trapping people in drawings. Like, she'd draw someone – a kid, a person, a cat, whatever – and it would be absorbed by the picture. Happened to me, and the TARDIS, had to rely on Rose to figure it all out. But, y'know, Rose is good in a crisis, even before she became a literal god of time, or whatever…"

"Is that what's happening now? An Isolus?"

"Oh, well… it _could_ be, maybe, but the likelihood of that kind of thing happening twice is tiny. And besides, Chloe had to at least sort-of know what the people she took looked like, because she had to draw them. Seems impossible somebody could be drawing so many individuals from across the entire city. She was only able to take so many because she drew the whole Olympic stadium, and eventually tried to draw a picture of the planet, but it wasn't malign. It was just lonely."

Clara turned to pull into the drive while the Doctor kept talking about this past outing with Rose, which Mattie had definitely heard some mention of before – 'the time we went to the 2012 Olympics' – from her godmother, but had to slam on the brakes. The whole van jerked.

"Did you stall? What was that?" the Doctor asked. Clara was leaning forwards over the dashboard, however, frowning. Without a word, she pulled on the handbrake and got out. Mattie and the Doctor followed, leaving the van with the doors open, to see something quite unusual: a tree.

Right in the middle of their driveway, peeking up through the gravel, was a foot-tall tree, just growing there. Matilda didn't recall it being there that morning. Could trees just grow in a matter of hours?

"Okay, that's… weird," said the Doctor, putting her hands on her hips.

"There was no tree there yesterday," Clara said, "Have you planted a tree?"

"Why would I plant a tree in the middle of the driveway?"

"…Maybe some kid did it. It's only gravel here, you could dig it up, I guess…"

"'Some kid'?" Mattie asked.

"Lyle Thompson lives a few doors down, and he can be a shit sometimes," Clara said, "You won't know him, he's just gone into Year 9."

"Where do you think he got a tree from?" Mattie said.

"No idea, a garden centre? Nicked it from somebody else? Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me, when I was in school one of the sixth formers paid to have a batch of live crayfish delivered to the front reception."

"Really? Damn, what a genius…" said the Doctor, "You've never told me that story."

"Well, they were crawling all over the office. I think he got some delivered to the kitchens, too. Got expelled for his efforts, three months before our A2 exams," Clara explained, "I think he ended up getting an apprenticeship at a funeral home."

"How strange," the Doctor mused.

"Well… what are you going to do about the tree?" Mattie looked between them.

"Ignore the tree," Clara sighed, "I'll park on the street."

"I'll dig it up tomorrow," the Doctor decided, "Not tonight, I'm too tired. C'mon, Matts, let's go inside. I'll tell you more about the Olympics."

"Sure…" said Mattie unsurely, glancing at the tree as she walked past to follow the Doctor to the front door. There was something very odd about that tree, outside of its sudden appearance in the middle of the drive, and Matilda found herself going out of her way to avoid it. She didn't like it one bit, and hoped that the Doctor would make good on her promise to get rid of it the following morning.


	17. Invasive Species - Chapter 5

_Invasive Species_

 _5_

Clara's sleep was disturbed by unnatural snoring booming alongside her ear. Halfway between sleeping and waking, she elbowed the mass behind her, which snorted, and then rolled even closer, flopping one of its arms across her side. Disgruntled, she buried her face in her pillow, but it only got more and more irritating. As a last resort, she fumbled in the duvet until she found her phone buried somewhere beneath the sheets; squinting in the dim, dawn light she managed to set an alarm for a minute in the future, turning up the volume. The obnoxious sound effect – which was supposed to be windchimes or something like that – did the trick, waking up the sleeping Doctor, startling her. Clara dropped the phone on her head from a few inches above, and she flinched.

"Ow…" the Doctor mumbled, retrieving Clara's phone and blindly patting the touch-screen until, by pure chance, she managed to hit the 'snooze' icon. She slumped down in the bed again with the phone on the pillow next to her and grimaced. "It's Saturday."

"You were snoring," Clara told her.

"No, I wasn't. I don't snore."

"You snore sometimes."

"I guess I was extra-relaxed…" she mumbled, curling up again. "Maybe it's all the pillows. Why do we need so many pillows?"

"I heard that smoking can make people snore," said Clara, "Maybe you smoke too much." In retaliation for that, the Doctor lifted one of the smaller pillows from the headrest and threw it – somewhat meekly – at Clara's face. Clara dropped it on the floor behind her. "I really want to smoke now…" She rolled onto her back, the Doctor still at her side; she always slept on Fridays now they had a proper schedule, rather than being forced to guess how many days had passed. "You're gonna mess up our routine if you don't wake up properly soon."

"I'm not gonna do you."

"But it's Saturday morning."

"I'm not in the mood."

"Jesus. You have to ruin everything, don't you?" Clara quipped. The Doctor smiled slightly and didn't say anything for a long few seconds. Sunlight peeked around the edges of the curtains; Clara liked it when it was dark in there, it made it harder to see all the mess.

"Good morning, Coo."

"It's a bad morning. It's a morning without sex. That makes it bad."

"That's most mornings."

"But not _Saturdays_."

"Get a hold of yourself. I'm depressed. I've been depressed by the news. And you threw your phone at me."

"I just dropped it – and I'm sorry. You _were_ snoring, though."

"Then I guess _I'm_ sorry for uncharacteristically snoring. Can I go back to sleep now?"

"And leave me on my own?"

"Aww… c'mere," she said, wrapping her arms around Clara again, "At least it's the weekend. How long is it until half-term, again?"

"Ha, ha. Five weeks," said Clara.

"I can't wait for Halloween."

"No Halloween-talk until October," Clara said, which was a rule she'd had to come up with after last year's autumnal celebrations had gotten very extreme, and the Doctor had started decorating in mid-September. Clara had never been particularly interested in Halloween, outside of using it as an excuse to go and get drunk in her youth, and didn't like having to put up with it for that long. And because the Doctor had cut her hand open trying to carve pumpkins very early; the rule was for her own good, and they had a similar one about 'no Christmas-talk until December.' Clara liked that, because it meant the only major celebration on their minds in November was her birthday.

"I forgot what a chore it is having to stay 'professional,'" the Doctor went on to complain. Clara retrieved her phone again to check her messages but laughed slightly. "I can't even say, like, half the things I want to say to you. Nick told me he thinks I'm quiet, can you believe that?"

"You? Quiet? Not really. But it's funny when you don't say anything at work – you remind me of Jenny. Just standing there… listening."

"Mm, she can be ominous like that."

"Nobody at work understands the suffering I go through, having to listen to you," Clara joked, "Constant, non-stop monologuing right in my ear, about _SpongeBob_ and _Scooby-Doo_ and _Pokémon_."

The Doctor yawned, "It's _Courage the Cowardly Dog_ at the moment."

"Of course it is. Because I'm married to a child."

"It's a very thematically complex cartoon, Clara – it deals with existentialism in far more depth than lots of 'mature' fiction," she argued. Clara regretted bringing it up now and dreaded the Doctor going on a long tirade about the socio-political themes of very old cartoons. The worst part was the Doctor's inherently argumentative tone whenever she brought it up, when Clara didn't necessarily find herself disagreeing with what was being said. She was just filling the void of whatever antagonist the Doctor wanted to _think_ she was arguing with. Clara had just as many pointless arguments, only she normally directed them towards Tom and not her wife.

"What do you want to do today?"

"Apart from get rid of that tree?"

"Well, if you don't wanna have sex with me, then there must be something really important you have to do."

The Doctor scoffed, "Be quiet. I just can't be bothered. It's an hour of my life I'll never get back."

"I'll be quicker than that."

"I don't care. What're you watching?" Her head next to Clara's on the pillow, she took the time to look at Clara's phone screen.

"Blackhead video. Sarah sent me it."

"Does she have nothing better to do than watch these things? Eurgh…"

"This is a good one," said Clara.

"You're gross. You say _I'm_ gross, but _you're_ gross."

"I'm the gross to your gross."

"That doesn't even make sense," she said, then Clara shushed her so she could focus all of her attention on the clip, even though it didn't have any sound to begin with. The Doctor just closed her eyes and put her head on Clara's shoulder, trying to ignore the video of someone's severe nose blackheads being dug out with brutal, aluminium tools.

"He just got four at once – look!"

"I don't wanna look," the Doctor pushed the phone away from her face where Clara had thrust it.

"They look like slugs."

"Eurgh! Get away from me! I've seen enough blackheads in my life – and _lots_ of them were yours," she snapped, going to leave the bed, which Clara objected to.

"Where're you going? It's still early."

"I'm going to have a shower and hopefully regain my appetite," she muttered, getting up. "And then, if I'm not too disgusted, I guess I'll make breakfast. What do you want?"

"I don't know. Anything with bacon in it. I'm in a bacon mood. Remind me to show Mattie this video later; she'll love it."

"I will not do that, but how do bacon and eggs sound?"

"Just the thought is turning me on. Are you sure you don't want me to join you in the shower?" The Doctor stopped halfway through picking out clean clothes to take into the bathroom with her, glancing at Clara, who had sat up in the bed and leant forwards. She flashed what the Doctor knew to be her sweetest and most charming smile.

"Don't you do that," she warned.

"Do what?" Clara asked innocently.

"I'm immune to your wiles, Oswald."

"Since when?"

"I'm going to shower, _alone_. Without you badgering me, for once. Why not just get yourself off if you're that desperate?"

"Ugh. Maybe I will."

"Well, have fun with that, be sure to lock the door once I leave," she said, shaking her head. "But I want you downstairs in no later than an hour, otherwise _I'm_ eating all your bacon."

"Yes, ma'am," Clara did a joking salute.

"Don't do that."

"You're cute when you tell me off."

"I'm always cute," she said, opening the door, "Later."

"Sure, sure. _Later_." Clothes bundled in her arm, the Doctor paused after the door clicked shut. She didn't debate for longer than a few seconds, before turning to re-enter the bedroom, feeling thoroughly annoyed at herself. Clara had her phone out again but raised her eyebrows at the Doctor's return.

"Did you say you'll be quick?"

"I said I'll be quicker than an hour," she said.

"Dammit…" the Doctor muttered.

"What?"

"No, I'm just – I'm hungry."

"I _said_ I'll join you in the shower," Clara reminded her, "If you want to kill two birds with one stone." The Doctor just stood in the doorway and continued to think very carefully about her options. "I don't think this decision is as difficult as you're making it out to be; just come back to bed for twenty minutes. I _promise_ I'll make it worth your while."

"Matilda's right, though."

"About…?"

"These missing people. Coo, I want to, you know that; there're very few things I'd _rather_ do – but there's something bad going on. You _saw_ the news last night, almost 2000 people have gone missing in and around Brighton just this week. And what're we doing? Bickering about when and where we're gonna do the nasty next? We should be listening to Mattie and trying to do something of substance. Maybe Earth-life has made me – made both of us – complacent…" Clara sighed. It had been very clear on the news: the police had no leads, and people just kept vanishing, including whole search parties now who had been venturing out to try and locate their friends and family. So much for safety in numbers…

Clara said seriously "Close the door, come and talk to me." The Doctor did so, shutting it carefully behind her and putting her fresh clothes down on the end of the bed, going to sit on the edge of the mattress next to Clara. "I don't think we're being complacent, we're being careful, it's different. We just… don't have the same freedom to go involving ourselves in things unnecessarily, right? Not that this is unnecessary – I agree with you, it's serious, but we have to be sure we're not putting Matilda in danger before we go intervening. I know that's not who you are as a person, but it's why we're her guardians and not Ten and Rose, or Jack and Ianto."

"I'm going to do something, Clara," she said firmly, meeting Clara's eyes. Clara touched her face gently.

"Yeah, I know. Just make sure you bring me along, too."

* * *

Matilda came trudging downstairs some time before ten o'clock, finally understanding what it was like having a lie-in when she was forced to wake up at seven on weekdays. In all of her previous life, she'd almost never had to get up early; with her dad always at home, they'd both enjoyed lounging around and never really having to _be_ anywhere, much to the frustration of her mum, who was constantly working strange hours, or on-call, and always said she would _love_ to sleep in. Until she retired quite a lot of years ago.

She hadn't bothered to get dressed yet, instead, going through her phone messages. She had no shortage of texts from both Aki, updating her on the fruitless search for her missing dog, Hiro, and Stefani, who wrote in a borderline illegible style imbued with slang terms Mattie was utterly unfamiliar with. Mattie was trying to work out if Steph had mistakenly started texting her in Polish, or something. What had really gotten her out of bed was the pungent smell of fresh bacon, however, and so she went off in search of something to eat for breakfast that was a bit more interesting than the cereal or toast she had during the week.

Walking through the living room, she spied the Doctor in the kitchen, dressed and keeping her attention focused on a frying pan on the hob. Her hair was still wet, so she must have showered; she almost looked ready to go out and do something. Dig up the weird tree, hopefully. She heard Mattie jump down the stairs and so turned to greet her.

"Hey," the Doctor smiled, "Do you want some breakfast? I'm making bacon and eggs for Clara and me. She's just in the shower."

"Uh… could I just have bacon? I'll make a sandwich."

"Sure thing."

"Aki's dog's still missing," Mattie said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table and sitting down, phone on the top.

"Y'know, there was a time when it'd be rude to have your phone on the table during a meal," the Doctor said, "Those things keep everybody so distracted. Honestly, Clara's always on her phone, and I have no idea what she's doing half the time. Like, who is she texting? She has no friends… Anyway, as long as Aki's safe, I think the dog shouldn't be anybody's top priority."

"She texted me this video of these blackheads earlier, it was great," Mattie said.

"Mm, I saw it, she woke me up and stuck it right in my face. I'm telling you now, Matts, don't get married."

"You don't mean that, though," she said, "Do you? You don't hate being married?" The Doctor didn't answer right away, turning her attention back at her frying pan.

"Go fix your bread, this is almost done," she said. Matilda left her phone and went to follow the Doctor's instructions, getting the Nutella out of the cupboard and a few slices of bread. "The truth is, there's nobody in the universe I'd rather be with than Clara, and frankly, nothing that's more important to me than us staying happy together. Except, I don't know, maybe Jenny, or taking care of you. But Jenny can be a handful. So, no," she lifted up bacon rashers with a set of tongs and dropped them onto Mattie's plate, "I don't mean it. But I still don't like being forced to watch gross videos of some guy's blackheads."

"I don't think I could marry someone who doesn't like gross videos."

"Trust me, Matts, you never know what kind of person you'll end up marrying. I should know, I've married a bunch of people, and all of them pretty different." Mattie went to sit back down, which was when Clara decided to make her appearance, just in time for the Doctor to crack some eggs into the pan. She was dressed, too, but she stopped dead when she saw Matilda's plate.

"You're not having Nutella with bacon, are you?"

"So what if I am?" she grew defensive. Clara shook her head. "Are you two going somewhere?" Mattie asked, looking between them as Clara went to retrieve a plate.

"Depends," the Doctor answered, but it wasn't much of answer. What did it depend on? She was beginning to think _she_ should've changed out of pyjamas before coming downstairs. "Matilda was just asking me if I like being married."

"Oh yeah?" asked Clara, "What did you say?"

"I said you're the bane of my life."

"Sounds about right."

"That's not what she actually said," said Mattie, "She said something lame, and sappy."

"Aw," Clara patronised the Doctor, "You took the effort to be lame and sappy for me?"

"Don't let anyone say I don't work at this relationship," said Thirteen, prompting Clara to kiss her cheek and wait obediently with her plate of bacon for the fried eggs to be done. They were spitting quite aggressively, but Mattie had never been too keen on eggs, especially not the smell of them cooking. It was something which upset Clara more than it reasonably should, whose entire existence seemed to revolve around when she could next eat eggs or egg-based food (i.e., her beloved mayonnaise.)

"So, is Clara your favourite wife? Because you've had loads of wives, right?" Mattie asked.

"Erm," Clara began, "Are you trying to start drama, Matilda?"

"No," said Mattie quickly, though admittedly, she had been a _little_ curious about if that question would start an argument. The Doctor lifted an egg out of the pan with a fish slice and let it slide onto Clara's plate, while Clara continued to scrutinise Mattie.

"Well, you know what? By process of elimination, she's the only person I've married who _hasn't_ tried to kill me," the Doctor explained, "Since Lizzie ordered me to be executed, and even Marilyn – well, I wouldn't say she was actively trying to _kill_ me, but she did once throw some very dangerous projectiles at me. One of them went through the window, right into the pool. And she still goes all poltergeist on me. River was literally indoctrinated to be my assassin."

"I am your favourite wife, then?" Clara implored her, taking her plate to sit down at the kitchen table opposite Mattie. The Doctor switched off the hob and went about getting herself some food, and of course, she had the most gargantuan portion all to herself, with three eggs, eight rashers of bacon, and four slices of bread and butter.

"I guess you must be, darling."

"So, then," Clara again turned her attention on Matilda, "You've done your first week of actual school. How'd it go? You know, on balance."

"Uh, well, I don't know. I've got a friend, though – I've never had a friend before who wasn't some weird adult who was supposed to be babysitting me. And… I guess science is cool, with Mr McCloud. But I don't like French. And English is, like… well, I don't know, _To Kill a Mockingbird_ is depressing, and it's full of the n-word."

"Mm, that it is," said Clara, "We have to teach it though. The syllabus is very rigid with what we can set for GCSE texts. At A Level there's much more freedom."

"I doubt I'm gonna do an English A Level. No offence."

"I'm very much offended," said Clara, "You're grounded."

"Grounded from doing what? I never go anywhere," Mattie countered.

"From…" But Clara couldn't think of anything. "Let this be a lesson for you."

"About as interesting as an English lesson." The Doctor snickered.

"Aren't you in Tom's class?"

"Who's Tom?"

"Mr Miller."

"Oh, yeah."

"And you think his lessons are boring?"

"…I'm not going to grass to you," Mattie said.

"I'm not asking you to – but I'm the head of the department. I'm just surprised, I've seen lots of Tom's lessons, he's a good teacher. _He_ was almost made the head, so now he fights me on everything."

"It's not _him_ , I just don't like the subject. I don't care about old books or what they might mean or what authors might have intended when they wrote them," she shrugged, "It's just, blech. I prefer, like, maths or science. Maybe you two should have your own kid and make it like all the boring, made-up subjects, like English or history."

"You forget that I have a kid, and she's not particularly interested in either," said the Doctor, "Nor is Oswin."

"No, she told me once that everyone who's ever written a book is a wanker," said Clara, "And that's an exact quote. Because I said she should write a book about, I don't know, unravelling the mysteries of the universe – since she is a genius, after all – and she said if she 'subscribed to that specific strain of narcissism' she might as well just shit in her own mouth." Matilda went off her food after hearing that. "Sorry. It's just an expression. She's a hologram, she can't shit anywhere." Mattie's phone went off on the table next to her.

"Do we have a rule about phones at the table?" the Doctor asked.

"No," said Clara, "Why? Do you want one?"

"Maybe…"

"It's just breakfast."

"It's Aki," said Matilda, "There's been a major earthquake in San Francisco."

"Oh, really?" Clara frowned.

"Esther's there, that's why she mentioned it. She thinks Esther is basically the coolest person in the world or something."

"As long as she never meets her and realises what a massive nerd she is."

"Hey," said the Doctor, "I like Esther. She's the only one who plays on that NES with me."

"Oh, yeah, Esther's _so_ cool. With her NES," said Clara dryly. "Although, there's no way she's gonna be able to come and help us today if she's in California helping earthquake victims."

"Help you do what?" Mattie asked, watching the video Aki had sent her. Truthfully, though, it wasn't much of a video; Esther moved so quickly she was just a blue flash most of the time. "CNN has pledged to get an interview with the Lightning Girl, apparently."

"Good luck to them, I think even Sally Sparrow struggles to get an interview with the Lightning Girl these days," said Clara, "She has to talk to me now."

"The poor girl…" said the Doctor. Clara elbowed her.

"What did you want Esther's help with? Are you keeping things from me? You can't do that," Mattie argued.

"Nothing, nothing, the Doctor needs to talk to Helix, anyway," said Clara.

"Can Helix help me with my homework?" Mattie asked, then, before either of them could respond, she said, "Helix – can you help me with my homework?" addressing the room at large.

" _Affirmative, Miss Smith-Jones, what subject do you require help in?_ " Helix asked smoothly from the various speakers throughout the house. He was wired into the entire building as the 'house AI'; that was the thing in the future, most houses had one in-built, to take care of security and calendars and whatever other things people used them for. Only the ones built on Earth weren't nearly as advanced as Helix was, nor were they real AIs.

"No, Helix," said Clara, "Don't help her. She can ask us for help first. If I find out you've been using Helix to help with your homework, you actually _will_ be in trouble." Mattie believed her and did not want to get in trouble.

"Helix, do you have access to the UKSA database?" the Doctor asked, mopping up the rest of her last egg with her bread.

" _Affirmative, Doctor._ "

"Can you summarise for me the data they gathered on the meteor shower last week, on August 31st?"

"The meteor shower?" Mattie asked.

" _All meteors disintegrated upon entering the planet's atmosphere, detectable remnants no larger than an average grain of sand. The event itself was categorised as 'anomalous_.'"

"Anomalous why?" asked the Doctor.

" _It was not predicted and the pattern was ruled to be atypical of standard meteor showers. There was a minor warning for UKSA officials to 'be aware' on the evening of August 31st, but there have been no follow-up comments_."

"Is that it, then?" Mattie questioned, "It took you a whole week to decide to just ask Helix that one question?"

"Mattie, I don't appreciate your tone," said the Doctor, "We've been doing this for a long time, alright? It's basically a given that UKSA won't have any useful data, they're incompetent. But I doubt that NASA will have been monitoring it very closely. Helix – check Roscosmos."

" _Roscosmos also denoted the August 31st meteor shower as unusual, but detected nothing of concern_ ," said Helix.

"Just let me think about it for a minute," said the Doctor. All their plates were now clear. "There must be something I'm missing…"

"Well, I'm gonna go see if there's anything about this earthquake on TV," Clara decided, getting up and leaving her plate on the table.

"Hey – you know we have a dishwasher?"

"I'll sort it out later," Clara called back, going into the living room. The Doctor shook her head.

"She is a mess, you have no idea," she told Matilda, "She used to have this habit of putting out her cigarettes in half-empty cups of coffee." Mattie then very deliberately put _her_ plate away in the dishwasher while the Doctor still had some bacon left, so that she could go join Clara in watching the television.

They were presented with utter chaos on the twenty-four-hour news channel, scenes of massive devastation ripping across California. It had been a _very_ bad earthquake, but the enigmatic Lightning Girl was the only thing capturing the intrigue of the anchors; they were speculating about if anybody would be able to get a televised interview with her, which had been impossible so far, she'd only shown up in brief videos on social media, and she sometimes tweeted. Articles about her usually wasted their time trying to work out her identity, though considering Esther's identity was a woman who'd been legally dead since 2011 and had every record of her erased, Mattie doubted they'd be able to work it out. All the public knew was that she was a woman and that she was an American – or, at least, that she had an American accent. There was a very popular conspiracy theory that she was an experimental super-robot developed by CyTech, which Mattie thought was amusing.

Bad as the earthquake was, though, the real intrigue only began when Clara switched the channel to South East Today. Rather than a helicopter overhead shot of San Francisco, they were presented with one of Brighton – but an uncanny version of Brighton absolutely overflowing with trees. It was like a forest had sprung up in the city overnight, rippling with thriving greenery, breaking apart the roads and the buildings.

"Bloody hell… Doctor!" Clara shouted for her. Thirteen entered the room carrying her last bacon rasher, eating it without cutlery.

"What?" she asked. Clara pointed at the TV with the remote. "Holy…" Finishing the bacon rasher, the Doctor dashed across the room to get to the front curtains, dragging them open to reveal, with horror, the very same tree from yesterday. Only now it was over ten feet tall. _Overnight_ it had grown ten feet.

"Aki pointed out the trees on Monday," Matilda suddenly remembered, "And I think Steph said something about them, too."

"Magda said the entire school field was overgrown yesterday," the Doctor said, her mind racing. Clara turned up the volume on the TV while the Doctor retrieved her sonic screwdriver and keys from the coffee table. She went outside and Clara stayed to watch the news, leaving Matilda straining her ears to listen to the broadcast while watching what the Doctor was doing through the living room window.

"… _quarantine being enforced by the police, with incoming personnel from local regiments of the British Army and specialist support from branches of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce. Roadblocks surround the entire East Sussex boarder and residents of Brighton & Hove and neighbouring villages are warned to stay in their homes at all costs. All major transport links out of the city are down, and a statement was given to South East Today by BHC warning any and all potential commuters that all the underground lines are closed until further notice_…"

"UNIT's coming out, hmm…" Clara mused, "Here I thought UNIT didn't have much pull anymore… we'd better be careful, god knows what they'll do if they find the Doctor living here…"

"We're under _quarantine_!?" Mattie exclaimed.

"Quarantine doesn't affect the TARDIS, sweetheart," Clara assured her, "Try not to worry about it."

"You're telling me not to worry about it!? About _this_!? The city is overrun with – with _trees_!"

"Yeah…" but Clara seemed more interested than anything else. Outside, the Doctor was desperately scanning the trunk of the anomalous tree sprouting up through the driveway. More trees, as well as enormous sections of roots, were erupting out of the asphalt on the road. Clara dropped the remote back down on the table and decided she was going to go see what the Doctor was doing, and Mattie just followed in her tracks. "They've called in UNIT," she explained, leaving the front door ajar, "The entire city is quarantined."

"UNIT? We'd better steer clear of them."

"Ravenwood told me a story about trees growing overnight before, in London," Clara said, "It sounded ridiculous at the time… something to do with solar flares."

Thirteen laughed somewhat coldly, "Yeah, well, I doubt this is your friendly neighbourhood plant-life. I don't think it's friendly or from anywhere _near_ this neighbourhood. Aki's right, there _have_ been more trees and plants, all week – they must have come here in the meteor shower. I _thought_ there was something weird about it, remember? I couldn't put my finger on it…"

"But Helix said the meteors disintegrated," Mattie pointed out.

"To particles the size of a grain of sand. Y'know what else can be the size of a grain of sand? Pollen, seeds, all that jazz. I was talking about how the Isolus travel on solar winds in tiny pods, it's the same thing, they must have travelled here – that's why UKSA and Roscosmos thought they were 'anomalous' and weird. Even _I_ thought they came a little bit out of nowhere…" Mattie's phone started to buzz in her hand; it was Stefani, and she also had a string of very rapidly-sent texts she hadn't spotted, all asking Mattie to call her. In light of all _this_ , Mattie thought it probably _was_ urgent, and so answered while Thirteen and Clara continued to speculate about the trees.

"Hello?" she said, putting the phone to her ear.

" _Holy fuck! I didn't think you'd pick up_ ," said Steph, " _Listen, listen – look – I – I hate to be… I hate to call you since you don't even – and you don't even like me really, it's just, nobody else will answer me, they think I'm full of shit_."

"Okay?"

" _Jake's gone_ ," she sounded like she was crying, " _He went to Sam's for band practice last night, somewhere in Fiveways, and he was pissed at me, but he never came home, and he's still not home. And now my parents are losing their shit, and nobody will help me look, and the city is on lockdown – I don't know what to fucking do_!"

"Well, just, try and calm down," Mattie began, "Just as long as you stay at home-"

" _Stay at home!? With my shitty parents!? No, fuck that, I'm looking for him, I don't care if anyone comes to help me, he's my brother. Do you get that?_ " Mattie didn't have a sibling, so she wasn't entirely sure that she _did_.

"But they're calling in the military, Steph, you should go back home."

"Is that Stefani? Since when do you have her phone number?" Clara asked.

"She says Jake's gone missing and now she's out looking for him."

"What? No, tell her to go home."

"Clara told me to tell you to go home," Mattie said.

" _Fuck her! And fuck you! I'm not abandoning him_."

"…Did you say he was in Fiveways? Are _you_ in Fiveways?"

" _Yeah, thereabouts_."

"…Hang on," said Mattie, covering the microphone with her hand, "Do we live in Fiveways?"

"Yes," said Clara, "Is she close? If she's close… ugh. I'm going to regret this, but tell her to come here. In fact, no, you tell her to tell you exactly where she is and stay put, and we'll come and get her and look for Jakub."

"Steph?"

" _Yes, what?_ "

"Clara says can you tell me where you are so she can come and bring you here and make sure you're safe."

" _Are you shitting me? I'm invited to her house? Why does my brother have to go missing for this to happen?_ "

"Nothing's happening, she's just worried about you – where _are_ you?"

" _Just walking past the tube station across the street from the pub, Travellers Rest_."

"Well, go wait outside the pub. Steph says she's at Travellers Rest," Mattie related back to Clara.

"Really? Great, that's only five minutes away… okay, well, keep her on the phone, alright? Tell her to wait for me, I'll just put my shoes on," Clara decided, returning indoors and leaving Mattie alone with the Doctor outside, and Steph still raving down the phone.

"Clara says wait for her, she'll be down in a minute. We're, like, two streets away," Mattie advised.

" _Yeah, alright_ ," said Steph. Mattie didn't know what more to say. She couldn't tell Steph that Jakub was going to be fine, because she didn't have a clue. What were the chances that all the missing people were dead already?

"So… Jake's in a band, then?" she asked awkwardly, at a complete loss for words. The Doctor didn't pay her much notice, pacing around the tree in the driveway, examining it, sonicking it. She hoped Steph didn't hear the buzzing screwdriver and question what it was. Maybe Mattie could pass it off as 'weird tree noises'?

" _He plays the drums_ ," said Steph, " _It's mainly him and Sam, but they've got this bass guitarist called Oscar who, like, I don't know – he's some posh twat. He goes to a private school, they see him at the skate park. He's a complete bellend. They're called Tart Card_."

"They're called _what_?"

" _Tart Card_ ," Steph repeated.

"What does 'Tart Card' mean?" Mattie asked at exactly the same moment Clara returned carrying a pair of shoes. She sat down on the step in front of the house to put them on, tying the laces slowly.

"It's what they call adverts for prostitutes in phone boxes," she answered offhandedly, unaware of the conversation.

"Why do you just _know_ that?"

"Well – it's just – I've been in phone boxes before, I don't know. They're call girls, you see the ads in the phone box and ring them up then and there."

"Do you ring up a lot of call girls, then?"

Clara scowled at her. Down the phone, Steph asked, " _Who are you talking to_?"

"It's just Clara, she's talking about prostitutes."

" _You're_ the one who's talking about prostitutes," Clara said, "I only answered a question _you_ asked. Maybe you're the one who rings up call girls."

"Steph said Jake's band is called Tart Card," Mattie explained.

"Really? Tell Steph there are much classier prostitution-related band names you can come up with," she said.

"Like what?" Mattie prompted.

"The Fallen Women," the Doctor said, who apparently _was_ listening, in spite of how much attention she was paying to her tree.

"I don't like it," said Clara.

"What's your idea, then?" the Doctor prompted. Steph was quiet because she was, presumably, straining her ears to listen to this.

"I don't know – Ladybird?"

"Ladybird? Why that?" Mattie asked.

"It's Victorian slang, for a prostitute."

"I think Tart Card's pretty good, depending on their sound," mused the Doctor, "Like, I can see it for a grunge band, or garage rock, y'know? It's grimy. Like phone boxes. I'm a big fan of phone boxes."

"Must be a very exciting life you lead," said Clara, finally succeeding in putting on her shoes and getting to her feet, "Tell her I'll be there in a minute, and not to ask me any questions about prostitutes."

"Clara says she'll be there in a minute and don't ask her about prostitutes," Mattie informed Steph.

" _Does she sleep with prostitutes_?" Steph immediately asked as Clara left down the drive, the Doctor smiling and waving as she went, but otherwise focused on the tree.

"I don't think so," said Mattie, "I mean – no. Almost definitely not, she doesn't. She just befriends them."

" _Does she call them up in phone boxes? Maybe I should do that, call some escorts_."

"What would you pay them with? They're expensive. And you're underage."

" _I'm sixteen in October_ ," Steph said triumphantly, " _So I'm legal, and older women can feast upon me_."

"That's the worst thing anybody's ever said…" Mattie muttered, "How did you get over here? The news said the all the public transport is down. The tube, and stuff."

" _Yeah, you're telling me. I had to walk, from the other side of Hanover. Total fucking nightmare. I thought Ben would give me a lift, too, but he told me to eat shit_ ," she said.

"Who's Ben?"

" _This guy who's in college_ ," said Steph, " _His mum lets him drive her car around, we did it on the back seat_."

"Well, that's… nice…" Mattie mumbled, "Why did he tell you to eat shit?"

" _Because I only call him when I need a lift, and he's sick of it. Means I have to find somebody else who can drive. Mrs Oswald can drive – do you think she'll give me lifts places_?"

"No, I don't."

" _Why not_?"

"Because you're a creep, I guess."

" _Fuck you. My brother's missing and you're calling me a creep?_ You're _a creep_." Mattie didn't respond. " _Can I call her Clara if I'm coming to your house_?"

"I don't know, ask her when she shows up. She'll be there in a minute. Did you try to call Jake?"

" _Did I try to fucking call him? You don't think that's the first thing I did? I called_ you _, for fuck's sake_."

"Yeah, okay… you don't have to swear so much, you know."

" _Why don't_ you _swear? Are you a swot?_ "

"No, but-"

" _Oh my god_."

"What?"

" _Nothing, she's here._ "

"Who?"

" _Who do you think?_ "

"Oh."

" _She's fucking hot_."

"That's nice."

" _Seriously. God. The things I'd let her do to me_."

"Keep them to yourself, please. Can't she hear you?"

" _Not quite_."

"Well, if Clara's there, I'm gonna hang up."

" _Sure thing. And if we're delayed, you know what happened_."

"…What happened?"

" _You know. A rendezvous. Sexy, like._ "

"Oh, of course. Because that'll definitely happen."

" _Really? Do you think there's a chance_?"

"Bye, Steph," Mattie said, hanging up the phone. The Doctor was watching her. "Is she my friend now?"

"Sure does look that way," said the Doctor. Mattie wasn't sure how to feel about that.

"Doesn't it get on your nerves?"

"What?"

"I don't know, that she's so creepy about your wife."

"I mean, it's not great, but it doesn't _bother_ me. If I got annoyed every time somebody crushes on Clara, I'd be a hypocrite, because I've been hardcore crushing on her for years." The Doctor went back to the tree. This time, though, she surprised Matilda, by jumping up and grabbing hold of one of its boughs. She hung from the limb for a few seconds, until it snapped under her weight. Mattie backed away when the Doctor fell to the floor, landing funny and ending up on the ground while the bough fell next to her. But the horror was only just beginning: a deep, red liquid spurted out of the broken end of the tree, which the Doctor scrambled to escape from, some of it getting on her jeans. "Dammit!" she exclaimed, "These are my good jeans! Urgh!"

"Forget about that – that _tree is bleeding_ ," Mattie pointed out, waving her arm at the tree.

"Yeah, but my _jeans_. They're Levi's, Matilda."

"Oh my god, who cares?"

"I do! Do you know what a hassle it is to steal clothes and make sure they fit properly?"

"You _stole_ them?"

"No. Of course not." She was obviously lying. "Stealing is wrong, don't do it, okay?" Mattie glared at her.

"The tree!"

"Okay, yeah, it's blood," she relented. It trickled from the broken bough's stump, and from the limb above them. She crouched down and drew out the sonic screwdriver again, scanning the liquid for a few seconds. "It's human blood, containing traces of enzymes. Enzymes of extraterrestrial origin."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that this blood is in the middle of some kind of digestive process. I'm, uh, not sure you're gonna like hearing this, but I think this is the blood of the missing people…" Mattie was horrified. Blood-sucking trees? Vampire trees? The Doctor straightened up and put her hands on her hips, thinking. "Did you say the tube is closed?"

"Yeah, it was on the news. BHC said all the underground lines are shut today."

"Alright…"

"What?"

"Well, these trees grow very quickly. They've taken over the whole city overnight."

"So?"

"So, if they're capable of taking over the city's _surface_ in a matter of hours, what have they been doing for the last six days? Just chilling out? Growing flowers?" Mattie was at a loss, not following the Doctor's train of thought at all – but that was hardly unusual. The Doctor wasn't always great at explaining what she was thinking. "I think we need to go down. Underground."

"You think they're coming from the tube?"

"Or lower," she said, "Here they are now. Haven't gone missing, at least." Clara, Steph following her like a lost dog, appeared around the corner at the bottom of the road. Clara didn't look _too_ irritated, at least. "Maybe you should've got dressed, you're still in pyjamas."

"It's not my fault that all _this_ has happened," Mattie complained, "How was I supposed to know I should get dressed? You two barely got dressed in summer when you weren't actually going somewhere."

"Yeah, okay. I was kidding."

"So? What are you going to do about the trees?" Mattie asked, but the Doctor shushed her because Steph was within earshot. Were they just going to lie to her then? Not explain that they sort-of knew what was going on? More than UNIT probably did, at any rate, and the rest of the city.

"And here you return to me – from the arms of a younger woman," the Doctor joked, welcoming Clara with a smile.

"Very funny," said Clara.

"What's happening, Stefani?" the Doctor asked.

"My brother's probably fucking dead."

"I heard about that."

"Is that tree bleeding?"

"It looks that way," she said, glancing at the blood again. Clara looked at the pool next to the dismembered tree stump and then stepped around it like it was something she saw all the time.

"Is that going to make a stain?"

"I don't know. I might have to get the pressure hose out."

"I don't trust you with the pressure hose, not after last time, with the horse."

"That was an isolated incident."

"Tell that to the bloke it kicked," said Clara. Mattie didn't know what they were talking about; neither did Steph. "Forget it – _I_ will use the pressure hose."

"Fine," said the Doctor, though she sounded annoyed. "Look, you girls go inside."

"Where are _you_ going to go?" Steph asked, looking between them.

"We're just gonna hop on the tube, that's all," said the Doctor.

"The tube's closed."

"Then I guess we'll be walking the tracks."

"But why? Shouldn't you let the army deal with it?" Steph implored.

"Army-schmarmy, you know what the army is? _Fascist_."

"You're not supposed to talk to the school children about politics, now," Clara warned her.

"I'm just saying, Clara, what kind of a world are we in where we rely on the military industrial complex to solve all our problems?" Clara glared at her. " _Whatever_. We need to go underground, with the mole people. Tube tunnels. Where do you keep your lighters?"

"I've quit," said Clara curtly, crossing her arms. Steph continued to observe, but Mattie was used to this by now.

"Where are they?"

"I threw them out."

"Yeah, okay." Clara didn't say anything, they just stared at each other, waiting for one of them to crack. "Are you gonna go get them, or just carry on lying to my face?" Clara was affronted.

"I'm not lying to your face."

"Uh-huh." A long pause followed.

"…They're in the air conditioner."

"Thank you for your honesty," she said, turning to leave and go back into the house.

"Are you still wearing pyjamas?" Steph asked Mattie in the awkward silence.

"I've only just had breakfast…"

"You girls go inside," Clara said, holding out her arm towards the door.

"Really?" Steph was awestruck, "You're inviting me in?"

"Unless you want to stay out here with the blood tree. But _don't_ try to follow us."

"You're really going to go into the tunnels?" Steph asked.

"Apparently so," said Clara, "But, please, go inside, and be good. And don't try to snoop around, Steph, the door to our bedroom is locked."

"You can pick locks."

"In which case I will call the police, and have you arrested for breaking and entering. Then take out a restraining order so you have to go to a different school," said Clara. Steph scowled. Obviously, visiting the house of her favourite teachers wasn't turning out _quite_ how she'd imagined. Then again, Matilda doubted that anything ever turned out how Stefani imagined it would. Clara herded the pair of them into the living room, where Mattie was suddenly acutely aware of all their very strange kick-knacks. The wedding photos, the video tapes, the stacks of books, the vintage telephone, the lobster tank. It was eclectic, to say the least, and Steph couldn't get enough of it.

"Is that a lobster!? It's blue!"

"That's Captain Nemo," said Clara, "Don't open the tank, he bites, and he's always hungry. And if you forget to put the lid back on properly, he'll get out, then we'll have to go find him. Which is surprisingly difficult, given that he's bright blue… Matts, if the phone rings, take a message, and if anything happens, talk to Helix."

"I thought I'm not allowed to answer the phone?" Mattie asked. When Clara said 'the phone', she didn't mean the regular landline, she meant the strange, vintage rotary phone. The Doctor called it the 'time phone' because calls to the TARDIS intended for the Doctor were re-directed to it. This meant all _kinds_ of people rang it, though these weren't usually people the Doctor ever seemed to want to talk to, which begged the question why she'd given them the number at all. Zelda Fitzgerald called a _lot_.

"Well, now you have permission, while we're out. And if _anything_ funny happens, make sure to let Helix know, and call Rose, okay?"

"Not you?"

"No, Rose," Clara reiterated.

"Who's Rose?" Steph asked.

"My godmother," Mattie explained.

"Funny how?"

"If the Jehovah's come round," Clara said. Meaning, if any crazy, alien stuff happened. The Doctor returned from the kitchen where the air conditioner was and handed Clara two disposable lighters. "The silver one is upstairs."

"I'm going to grab it now, and some aerosols."

"Are you making flamethrowers?" Steph asked.

"Probably," said Clara, examining the lighters.

"Do you smoke?"

"No. Not anymore." Mattie had seen her smoke last Sunday. "Smoking's bad for you."

"It's kind of cool, though," said Steph.

"It's gross," said Matilda, "It stinks. Mum always hated it, you know," she added to Clara specifically.

"Yes, I remember, she never stopped showering me with disapproval."

"I don't think you should go into the tunnels," Steph persisted, "They said on the news – and the army's coming-"

"We're just going to take a look around," Clara assured her, even though Mattie knew they most certainly were not. "We'll be fine."

"But you're just teachers, you can't go, like, fight these tree twats with just deodorant cans and disposable lighters."

"We're going to look for Jake."

"Then I should come."

"No," Clara told her, "Absolutely not. We'll find Jake. And Miss Pickman's cats. Aki's dog. What's the dog's name, again?"

"Hiro," said Mattie.

"We'll go look for them." Steph had absolutely no faith in Clara and the Doctor, but how could she? She didn't know anything about them, who they were, what they'd done. Just two months ago they'd been in what felt like a much worse position, stuck on an island of corpses trying to break into parallel dimension through a haunted house – the 'Unnameable.'

The Doctor came jumping back down the stairs with an old bag and some aerosols.

"You _can't_ be serious," said Steph, "You're literally going to fucking _die_."

"Watch your language," said Clara, "And I doubt that."

" _What_?"

"Stay inside," Clara went out into the hall to join the Doctor, "Don't mess with the lobster, don't answer the door, take messages from the phone, tell Helix and Rose if anything happens, okay?"

"Okay," said Mattie.

"We'll be back soon," the Doctor assured her, and with smiles of potentially misplaced confidence, they left Stefani and Matilda alone in the house, locking the door behind them.


	18. Invasive Species - Chapter 6

_Invasive Species_

 _6_

The Brighton & Hove Connection underground system had been erected over the course of five years some thirty decades ago. It was built entirely with maglev technology, so all of the trains were magnetic, 'floating' trains, though it had been a source of much controversy for a long time. Mainly because Brighton was not a major city, nor a particularly populated city, nor a centre for any kind of industry outside of environmental activism, Gay Pride, and tourism. So the decision to build an underground system there, of all places, didn't wash well with the country's _actual_ major cities. Birmingham still didn't have a subway, Leeds had one under construction, while Manchester had been granted the second after London. Glasgow had one, while Edinburgh remained geographically complex, and Cardiff seemed relatively ambivalent to the whole thing. Despite this, the BHC system only had three lines; its most ambitious one went directly into London; its least ambitious one went directly to Hove; its middle-ground circled Brighton's few, small boroughs; and it only had one large, central station (Buckingham Central Station) where all three lines convened – though 'large' was being generous. The Doctor supposed it had a WH Smiths and a Starbucks, and that qualified it as a 'major station.'

It was true that they did not frequent the tubes. They could use the psychic paper as a nifty, fake permit to park anywhere in the city, but there were also still plenty of buses and Brighton wasn't so large they couldn't walk into town. The one time they'd used it, it had only been to go to London for the day a while back, but it wasn't much easier than taking a regular, above-ground train (frankly, she thought the Brighton-to-London line was unnecessary, though the tickets _were_ cheaper.) But no matter how little time they spend on the underground, it was obvious that it was not supposed to look like how it did that day: completely overrun with roots.

Roots the thickness of barrels snaked their way across the walls, the ceilings, up the stairs, drooped down from above and created walking hazards. Where once there had been obnoxious, LED screen advertisements pointing at commuters from every direction – advertising vegan health drinks, ocean cleaning endeavours, new movies, and electric cars – there were now just trees. The roots had crawled across every available surface and out of the mouth of the station entrance, burrowing through the asphalt on the roads and growing into the bizarre trees like the one in the middle of their driveway. It was only a matter of time – perhaps hours – before the trees started plundering houses directly, breaking through the foundations to emerge from the depths and drag people below from their own living rooms and kitchens. All of this was illuminated once the Doctor found her torch buried at the bottom of her transdimensional bag. Clara used her phone for light, and if that failed the Doctor knew she would resort to one of the dim cigarette lighters they had.

"Okay, then," said Clara quietly, "I guess you're right. This is the place."

"Did you doubt me?" Clara shrugged. "Typical."

"What's typical is you denying me of sex and then taking me dungeon crawling."

"It's not a dungeon," the Doctor dismissed her, "Just train tunnels." The daylight dissipated behind them as they descended down the steps of the Fiveways Station, situated just across the road from the _Travellers Rest_. It was as though the roots around them were breathing, the station swelled with them, and the Doctor sometimes thought she glimpsed them move or heard sinister rustling. "What did we do with the lantern?"

"What lantern?" Clara asked, lurking at her shoulder, keeping her voice to a whisper like the roots were listening in.

"Didn't we have an old storm lantern? I thought… we got one from…" She paused to think and Clara observed her in the electric torch-light; it made Thirteen's face look washed out and strangely grey. Clara waited for the Doctor to remember, until she actually remembered herself what Thirteen was talking about.

"Oh – it's in the van. We took it with us when we drove to St. Ives for the weekend, in June, because you said it was 'atmospheric.' And then there was a storm the whole time, so it came in useful." Unfortunately, the refurbished VW camper didn't have a toilet; it was its only real shortcoming. That and the fact that even _they_ had to duck while inside. "You remember? Because you wanted to go surfing and I wouldn't let you."

"Yeah – why wouldn't you let me go surfing?"

"Have you forgotten that whole thing where you jumped into the sea and drowned, or-?" Clara asked sarcastically. Of course the Doctor had not forgotten that, though she sometimes did (among other, much more sensitive things.) "Not to mention that you don't even know how to surf."

"You can never learn if you don't try."

"Yeah, I don't think in the middle of a storm is the best way to learn."

"It's when the waves are highest!"

"When they're deadliest, you mean."

"Potato, po-tah-to."

"This is exactly why I don't let you in the sea," said Clara. The Doctor was very close to arguing with her about the entire idea of Clara having to 'let' her do anything at all, but resolved not to. After all, the list of things Clara would and would not 'let' her do was very short, and consisted of 1), go swimming in open water in a non-emergency, and 2), have freedom over her own money. There was also a list of things the Doctor would not let Clara do, however, which were 1), use any and all kitchen appliances and 2), borrow any of her tights, because Clara had an unpleasant talent for laddering them. "Do you want to go back and get the lantern?"

"No, it's fine. So long as I know where it is," she said. "We should go back so St. Ives, when the weather is nice."

"Why? There's not a lot there. We live on the south coast already," said Clara, "We should take the Eurostar and go to Paris. The Eurostar's magnetic now, right?" It was.

"What do you want to do in Paris? We've been a _lot_."

"I _know_ , I just _like it_. It's more interesting than London. We could take Mattie."

"Is this a romantic getaway or a family trip?"

"I don't know…"

"If it's a family trip, we'd have to take Rose. And Rose hates France."

"So let's go to some other capital – let's go to Edinburgh. We could go see the Vaults, we didn't get to last time we were there. Rose will go to Edinburgh, she loves Scotland. And there's all the Scottish people. With their accents."

"Ha, ha."

"Why don't _you_ have a Scottish accent?"

"I do – in the other universe, remember? Old, Scottish man."

"Oh, yeah."

"Incapable of loving you."

"Right."

"Sort-of, inadvertently caused your death."

"Mm. But I did get to marry a pretty fit girl because of all that." The Doctor stopped in her tracks just to glare at Clara, who only smirked. "When _is_ Jenny coming over for dinner next? Shall we invite her to Edinburgh with us?" The Doctor shook her head and didn't answer; Jenny was coming for dinner next week, which Clara knew full-well because she had a made-up schedule for them in her head she kept track of religiously. "Assuming we don't get eaten alive by vampire trees."

"What about Cohen? Maybe she'll want to go back to Edinburgh."

"She's Glaswegian."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure. So, where are we going? Now we're down here." Admittedly, the Doctor's plan hadn't extended that far. She'd just about scraped together aerosols and lighters to use as a last-ditch attempt at self-defence and thought the next stage would just present itself to her once they were in the dark train tunnels.

"Uh… we should go left. Towards Buckingham."

"If you say so," said Clara, aware that the Doctor was just guessing at which way they should walk. But it didn't really matter, the line went around in a circle _anyway_. Technically, left or right would get them to Buckingham Central, it just so happened that left was quicker. It was only three stops away. "Come on, then," said Clara, dropping down from the edge of the platform onto the root-covered tracks. She took the Doctor's torch while she followed, landing awkwardly on the uneven surface. "What, exactly, are we in here looking for?"

"Missing people?" the Doctor suggested.

"You don't think they're dead?"

"Maybe not _yet_. Takes a while to drain a whole human of blood, depending on the method; I doubt the trees are cutting anybody's throat, so they must be doing it another way."

"Another way, like…?"

"I don't know, proboscises? Unless it's not just the blood, and they're eating them? But a Venus flytrap can take up to twelve days to fully digest its prey. If it takes these things twelve days to do whatever it is they're doing to a human, then we're not even halfway through the process – there might be a lot of people we can still save. Maybe even all of them." She wasn't sure whether she believed that or not. "But I guess Audrey II was a big, alien plant and it always ate people _very_ quickly."

"It also sang doo-wop songs, so, I'm not sure how comparable it is to this situation."

"We don't know that these trees _don't_ sing doo-wop songs."

"Amy and Donna met that one who sang pirate shanties and killed Amelia Earhart. Or so they say," Clara continued sceptically, "Personally, I've never been convinced that that entire story wasn't just a fever dream. You know, there's a lot of stories about man-eating trees in folklore – there's one about a blood-sucking tree from Nicaragua, the vampire vine. Its vines were supposedly covered in tiny suckers, like tentacles, and it ripped the flesh from anything that touched it. Probably more interesting is that the whole story is a load of shit, though – some guy, a newspaper editor, made the whole thing up and published it pretending it was true in the 1880s. The story was published before _Dracula_ , though. But _after_ this big, New York hoax about a man-eating plant in Madagascar, which was in the 70s."

"Same time as the birth of western vampire fiction."

"Oh, of course," said Clara, "But the entire Victorian period is obsessed with the macabre. Frankly, the obsession hasn't gone away, it's just atrophied into true crime… H.G. Wells wrote that story about the blood-sucking orchid. I was thinking about getting a yucca, you know."

"Were you?"

"I _was_. After this tree invasion, I'm not so sure… and I meant, maybe it's to do with developments in science; understanding the role that blood plays in the human body, which led to a boom in fiction about parasitic monsters _stealing_ blood. Maybe I should do another degree – medical history? Cohen's a pathologist, do you think she knows anything?"

"Maybe, but she still doesn't like you."

"But she might like talking to me about man-eating plants."

"If you want to do another degree, then go for it," said the Doctor. "While you've been talking about plants, however, _I've_ been thinking about fungus."

"Are fungi not plants?"

"No, they're fungi."

"So not plants?"

"Is a spider an insect?"

"I… yes…?"

"It's an arachnid, it's different. Anyway, have you heard of mycelium? It's an underground fungal network, a mushroom internet. The fungi connect all the other living creatures together, too, so that they can share resources, like food and water."

"And memes," said Clara. "You know, if it's like the internet."

"Everything you say makes me hate you even more."

"Thanks."

"My point is that I think all the trees are connected to each other – they're not separate plants. If anything, the roots in these tunnels prove that theory."

"So the roots just, what, lead to the other trees?"

"I don't think so… it reminds me of the Lankin, have I told you about the Lankin?" Clara stayed silent, indicating that the Doctor had not. "It's an alien shapeshifter made out of vines, partially telepathic, sniffs out grief. It finds people who are grieving and then comes to them at night in the form of their deceased loved ones, working telepathically to find out all the right things to say, and then convinces them to come with it to 'heaven,' when in reality it's eating them. A million vines and stolen faces extend across a whole city, appearing overnight, and eventually take over the whole planet that way, stealing an entire species for themselves. But they were part of one creature, all the vines led back to one central entity."

"And how do you kill a Lankin?"

"Poison it, with negative emotions, like anger. You remember the Coal Hill kids?"

"I do not."

"Well, they fought a Lankin."

"Great."

"I think these trees might be similar, they might have a locus," the Doctor explained, "One big, like, plant-heart. I mean, technically I don't think these things even count as plants, if they devour flesh. Like, sure, a Venus flytrap or a pitcher plant also eats flesh, but they dissolve it in enzymes. They _do_ photosynthesise. Although – and here's the science bit – even on Earth, you do have heterotrophic plants."

"Heterotrophic?"

"Parasitic, they get their nutrients by attaching to other trees and plants and stealing from them. Beechdrops, or broomrape."

"Sorry, did you say broomrape?"

"Yeah."

"Like… 'broom', and then 'rape'?"

"I said it's a parasite. Even mistletoe steals nutrients, though it's not truly parasitic, because it still contains chlorophyll. Broomrape doesn't have _any_ chlorophyll, and that's why if you see one, it's not green. They're sort of… coral. Salmon. There's a Native American tribe who use the clustered broomrape to cure haemorrhoids. You put the plant up your, uh… _y'know_. Where you get haemorrhoids. The Zuni do that. Maybe it works? I couldn't tell you. Did you see the leaves on those trees up there? They're red and orange, not green."

"It _is_ September, the leaves are starting to turn."

"No, they're heterotrophic organisms. As in, _non_ -photoautotrophs. They don't photosynthesise because they don't get nutrients from the sunlight, they steal them, from the humans they're eating. The only positive about all this is that the dumb things will probably digest things just as slowly as Earthling plants do."

"Okay, so we have to run a stake through the heart of the vampire-tree-internet?"

"I wouldn't put it that way. And we also don't have a stake. We have aerosols."

"Well, the stake is proverbial."

"Of course it is. I wonder who the Lankin would show me if they had to… I've got a _lot_ of grief, I'm sure they'd come for me. But I don't think they'd be reasonably able to appear as an entire species. And besides, seeing the all the Time Lords back again would probably stamp out a _lot_ of the grief I have for them all being dead," she mused. "Maybe it wouldn't be able to get a read, to figure me out."

"How do you know they'd even _want_ to eat a Gallifreyan like you? And maybe you're too old. Rancid."

"You sure know how to compliment a woman. To be honest, there's only one voice they'd ever have a hope of tricking me with – but you're not dead. So maybe I'd be immune."

"Really?" asked Clara, "You'd go to evil alien fake-heaven for me?"

"When you put it that way, how could I ever refuse?"

They reached another station, Hollingdean Station. After that it was Hanover, and then Buckingham Central. Their progress was slow but sure, and they'd get to Buckingham soon enough. The roots were only growing in intensity, however. They had infested the underground lines in a matter of hours; the tube had certainly been open yesterday, late into the evening. They couldn't even see the maglev tracks beneath their feet, they were walking across the thick, snaking tree roots, which she could have sworn she sometimes felt moving, like they were intrepid explorers stupidly wandering into a python's lair.

"Are you okay with having Steph in the house?" the Doctor asked eventually, "She is a little… obsessed with you. What if she does something? Steals a photo, or goes through our underwear drawer?"

"If she steals a photo Mattie will notice, and our bedroom door has a biometric lock just like the study. And I don't think she would steal our underwear."

"How do you know? She might have a thing for women's underwear. You know, like you do." Clara glared at her in the gloom. "What? It's true. Any and all typically-feminine undergarments-"

"Yes, alright."

"Just one _mention_ of the word 'garter' and you're-"

"Shh."

"I'm just-"

"No, _shush_ ," Clara stopped dead in her tracks. Obviously, there was something more important going on than the Doctor trying to annoy Clara about her 'tastes' on purpose. When they paused to listen, they both heard a noise; a distant, slithering, grating, drifting from just outside of the range of their lights.

They had less than a second to react when a tendril shot out of the shadows, fast as a bullet, at head-height. If Clara wasn't so used to dragging the Doctor out of harm's way, that could have been the end of her – she could have had her brains smashed to pieces by a lump of wood travelling over a thousand miles an hour. Clara grabbed Thirteen and pushed her back towards one of the walls. The root moved like a tentacle, stopping and beginning to retract itself, slowly, like it was searching for them.

Clara did not remove her arms from around her as they watched, in silence. Something else began wrapping around their legs though, as they pressed themselves against the wall. It was only unfortunate for them that the wall was covered in just as much foliage as everything else.

"Shit!" Clara cursed, trying to drag herself away as a multitude of smaller roots tried to bind both of them so they couldn't dodge the big, tentacle-y root. Lucky for them Clara could turn intangible. But freed from the wall, they remained vulnerable to the massive, monster root. The walls began to writhe around, moving to make way for more killer plants to get at them. The Doctor dropped the bag to the floor and hastily unzipped it. "Hurry up, hurry up," Clara implored.

"I _am_!"

They weren't quick enough to avoid the big root's second attack, though, as it lashed again, this time at Clara. She forced it away with a telekinetic blast strong enough to send it smashing into the tunnel wall. The strength of Clara's telekinesis was enough to rival the strength Rose wielded with her bare hands, allowing her to snap the sharp end of the root clean off. It writhed like a beheaded snake, but its progress didn't halt at all. It bled from the stump and tried to strike her again, which she was able to duck, drawing the attention away from the Doctor as she fumbled with the lighters.

"Seriously, I don't really know how I'm supposed to fight a tree!" she protested, ducking again. She couldn't do anything except keep pushing it away, but within moments a second root plunged towards them out of the train tunnel. Some of the roots underfoot also began moving, trying to trick her, make her stumble. It worked; Clara was briefly disoriented as she rolled her ankle, falling into the wall, and a root tore at the back of her leg. The Doctor didn't see exactly what happened, dimly aware that Clara had suffered an injury and collapsed.

She finally retrieved both a working lighter and a can of deodorant that wasn't completely empty, able to come to Clara's aid right as one of the roots reared itself to strike a killing blow. She stepped in front of Clara and blasted a stream of flame at the tree, the largest root catching on fire instantly. It flailed uselessly, smacking itself against the walls in an effort to extinguish the blaze. When the second root tried to swipe Thirteen, she gave it the same treatment. The makeshift flamethrower was enough to ward off their attackers, the two assailants charred as they retreated, retracting themselves into the shadows.

"Are you okay, Coo!? What did it do?" the Doctor dropped to her knees next to Clara to get a look at Clara's leg. There was a gash across the back of her shin, and while it was bleeding, the tree had managed to miss any major arteries. The wound was jagged and grisly though, leaving the Doctor more concerned about any risk of infection. "Alright, you're gonna be fine, the bleeding's not that bad," she talked as she began to rummage in the bag again for the first aid kit it possessed.

"Now we're _definitely_ not getting a yucca," Clara complained, holding her leg and wincing. The Doctor managed to find a roll of bandages.

"Put some pressure on it," she said. Clara did just this, though it clearly caused her a tremendous amount of pain.

"Stupid trees… stupid tube…"

"Yeah, I know. Keep still for me. I don't think it'll take too long to heal, but I'll wrap it for you to be safe. Thanks for protecting me."

"You don't have to thank me."

"I'd hate for you to think I'm _completely_ ungrateful for everything you do for me."

"We should go to the Riviera again," Clara tried to change the subjects as she lifted her hands away so the Doctor could start to wrap the bandages around her shin.

"Why?"

"Because Zelda won't stop calling and inviting us to Monte Carlo."

"Not because you want to stalk Grace?"

"I don't even think Grace was born yet, when Scott and Zelda spent their time down there." Clara was right, she hadn't been born at that point in time. "I don't know why you won't let me meet her. I've still never seen the two of you in the same room together…"

"Ha, ha. You think I'm gonna dump you and go marry into the royal family of Monaco, do you?"

Clara shrugged, "Maybe."

"I do think you're the only person who sees this resemblance."

"Do you know she wore glasses?"

"You're unbelievable."

"I'm just _saying_ … I wish you would wear glasses more often."

"Of course you do." The Doctor only half paid attention while she wrapped the bandages around and around, looking up every so often to search the shadows for more violent trees. "Jenny still has those night-vision glasses. They'd be pretty useful right about now. Look in the bag for a safety pin, could you?" Clara did so. "I'm serious about Edinburgh, you know."

"I'll go anywhere with you, you know that. We can go in half-term, if you want?"

"Sure."

"…If you ever want to go somewhere with just us, then I'm fine with it, you know," Clara said, finding a safety pin and handing it to the Doctor. "Like, Mattie's great, but we still had a teenager sprung on us out of nowhere. Not to mention Rose hardly leaves."

"Sounds a bit like you're saying _you_ want us to go somewhere alone together."

"I can't lie and pretend I don't like it when it's just the two of us." The Doctor smiled, fixing the bandages with the safety pin.

"It's just the two of us right now."

"Us and the plants."

"There – how's that?" she asked. Clara tried to put some weight on her leg and flinched.

"It'll have to do." The Doctor picked up the aerosols and lighters and dropped them back into the bag, slinging it over her shoulder again, retrieving the torch from the ground.

"I'll help you, c'mon," she stood up and helped Clara to her feet.

"You don't have any of my sister's old walking sticks in that bag, do you?"

"No, you know how protective she is of those," said the Doctor, wrapping an arm around Clara's waist to keep her upright. Clara held onto her as they continued deeper into the tunnels.

Clara now struggling and the Doctor having to support her as she limped, they went on for quite a while without talking about anything. Listening into the darkness, trying to spy any more violent roots and pre-empt a follow-up attack. Hollingdean Station floated towards them out of the gloom, just as overrun as all the others. She asked Clara if she wanted her to jump up onto the platform and go steal a drink from a vending machine, but Clara said no, so they continued their slog.

"I think those tentacle-roots are how they're taking people. Dragging them down from the surface." Clara made a noise which meant she agreed with this but was focusing too much on trying to walk with her injured leg to form a full sentence. The Doctor continued to think for a while, until trying a different approach to try and distract her from the wound. "Hey, d'you remember when we ran into Missy? In that maze?" Clara frowned in thought. "It was when I went back in time. I kissed you by accident, when I wasn't meant to."

"Oh."

"You were trying to avoid talking to me? Because of our volatile sexual chemistry?"

"Uh-huh."

"You fell in a cave and got a rock impaled in your leg. This reminds me of that. Only less awkward. God."

"What?"

"It's crazy."

"What is?"

"It's crazy how crazy you were about me."

"Still am, against my better judgement."

"Do you wanna know a secret?"

"Do we have secrets?"

"I have the apology letter you wrote me for when you tried to kiss me," she said, "I kept it and brought it back to the future with me." Clara stopped walking and looked at her with an expression even the Doctor couldn't quite decipher.

"You're incorrigible."

"I like how ineloquent it is. You gotta understand, Coo – for a long time I've been married to a celebrated poet. And then there's this letter, this total throwback, and it's… clumsy. And adorable. There's something uncanny about the great C.R.O. Fantoma being unable to string a sentence together."

"Yeah…" said Clara vacantly. She wasn't fully listening, off elsewhere while the Doctor reminisced about what was her recent past but was a long time ago to Clara. She did re-read that letter on occasion, imagining Clara's younger self daydreaming about her and resisting the urge to follow her around. It was funny how Clara was still known to behave so erratically around Sally Sparrow but supposed maybe Clara's swooning was more to do with unattainability than anything else.

"What're you thinking about?"

"Oh, nothing. I'm just – I'm worried. About these trees, and the people they've taken, if they're gonna be alright…"

"You worry too much. Sometimes I think you're all worry and not much else, and never worrying about yourself, either. But then, what's a girl to do? Complain that her wife is _too_ empathetic? God," she began as though she were in conversation with somebody else, "My darn wife was at it again last night – _caring_ about people. _Helping_ them. _Listening_ to their problems. _Being kind_. I can't stand it. If only I could just wallow in self-deprecation and wanderlust for the rest of my natural life _without_ somebody hanging onto me, being all supportive and concerned for my general wellbeing." Clara laughed. "And did I mention how pretty she is? I can't even look her in the eye! It's like staring into the sun. I'd almost be able to bear it if she wasn't so clever and funny on top of all that. Never fails to make me laugh when I'm upset about something, what's anyone to do with a woman like that? I'm thinking about divorcing her."

"I would," said Clara, limping, "Sounds like a nightmare."

"Well every time I try to divorce her, she sucks me back in with the poetry, the piano music, the charm, the _face_ , and I end up marrying her again! It's obscene. I even forgive her for smoking."

"I'm dying for a smoke right now."

"You're quitting."

"Mm… still not sure what the point is."

"Save money?" the Doctor suggested.

"I suppose."

"You've got too many vices, you've gotta pick the one vice, and stick to it."

"If I remember correctly, you did refuse to indulge me in my favourite vice just this morning. So, unless you mean turn to alcohol, you're going to have to be a bit more cooperative."

"Ha, ha."

"I'm serious – if you just get off with me every time I want a cigarette-"

"We'd lose our jobs, I'm sure."

"Spoilsport." The Doctor smiled, amused, but the conversation dwindled for a while. Clara still flinched every few steps as they ventured deeper and deeper into the underground system. "Trees haven't come back yet."

"They don't need to."

"How do you mean?"

"Think about it – the roots come out to drag people down into their lair."

"And?"

" _And_ , we're heading right into their lair anyway. They don't need to exert any extra energy. And maybe they're scared of my flamethrower."

"'Flamethrower' is being generous."

"I'm a generous person."

"I'm yet to see much evidence to that effect."

"Very funny. How's your leg?"

"…Sore," Clara mumbled after thinking, "Don't let go of me."

"Beginning to think you just want me to touch you."

"How could I not? After you _denied_ me-"

"Shut _up_. I don't understand you. You've almost had your leg ripped in half and you're _still_ horny? Like, come on. This is what I mean about vices, you have an addictive personality."

"Does that mean I get easily addicted to things, or that people get easily addicted to _me_?"

"It's the first one, you know it's the first one, you're unbelievable… careful here, the roots are getting bumpier." The number of roots increased every time they passed a station, clearly all leading somewhere, as she had speculated. They were finally approaching Hanover Station, and then there was (she hoped) just Central afterwards. All this walking had taught her was that Brighton was certainly not big enough to justify having a tube system at all, a tube system which was going to be out of commission for the next few weeks while the trees were cleared out. Provided they succeed, that was. "Are you _sure_ you're not bothered about Steph? About her befriending Mattie?"

"Are you sure _you're_ not bothered about Steph?" Clara challenged, having to go very slowly on the crisscrossing, uneven roots. The tracks and most of the walls were now completely obscured once they passed by Hanover Station, as though the tunnel had been dug by the trees and not by the council.

"I'm a little concerned that she might start telling stories."

"Stories?"

"Lies. About you, us, I don't know."

"I'd lose my job," said Clara, "But I don't think Stefani wants me to lose my job. And besides, I teach her English, she's not so good at making things up. Not convincing things, anyway, I'm sure she has an active imagination. As it is, she thinks I'm oblivious to how she gets Jakub to help her with all her homework."

"Wait, shouldn't you do something about that? She won't have Jakub to help her in an exam."

"You're saying I should start tutoring her? Privately?"

"That's _not_ what I'm saying."

"I've seen films with that exact premise."

"'Films'? Is that what you call them?"

"Look, I just… I've heard them say things, the Kaczmareks, about their parents. I know teenagers tend to exaggerate, but Steph told me they're not even worried about Jakub, not even looking for him, after he didn't come home all night. And then didn't care about her going out, either. And you know how she is, sleeping around – she's only fifteen. It concerns me. Even I didn't get that bad until after… well, you know. I just… call me naïve, or optimistic, or tell me I'm worrying too much again, but I think she could benefit from having adults in her life who actually do support her. I don't want her to turn into me, because there's next to no chance that she'd meet somebody like _you_. And you help me with my… trauma, I guess, more than anything else ever has."

"Yeah… yeah, no, you're right. I guess their parents being terrible is no reason for every other adult in their lives to give up on them and be terrible, too. The last thing you want is either of them doing something reckless because they don't have an appropriate adult. Like joining the mob."

"Well, Jenny does have a particular knack for falling in with organised crime wherever she goes. You remember when we went and saw Queen that time and somebody convinced her to start selling amphetamines after we'd only been there for twenty minutes?"

"How could I forget, my only child, a drug dealer. And at a Queen show, too. My forgiving her is how you know love truly can be unconditional."

"I wouldn't worry about it too much, Ravenwood went _mental_ when she found out."

"Is your leg better yet?"

"…Maybe."

"You don't have to pretend it's still hurting to get me to maintain a level of physical contact, you know."

"Eurgh, _maintain a level of physical contact_. You sound like a sociologist."

"I just thought it would be a bit too crass to ask if you want me to keep touching you," she said, relinquishing her hold around Clara. Lo and behold, Clara managed to walk again without assistance, limping even less than her sister on a good day. But the Doctor held out her hand, switching the torch to the other one.

"…Thanks," said Clara, taking it, lacing their fingers together like they were on a real date and not on a crusade to kill an alien garden. "Haven't seen anybody else down here. What do you think that means? No more kidnappings?"

"I don't know. Maybe we concern them? Maybe they've got enough for the time being?"

"Enough for what…?"

"I dread to think. Maybe it's just not able to continuously consume."

"For once I'd like to just have a few weeks without alien intervention like this. They could at least wait until the holidays to start invading – I've got marking I should be doing."

"It's the first week back, go easy on them."

"No, I had them write summaries of _To Kill a Mockingbird_ to check if they actually read it over summer."

"Then I hope you enjoy reading thirty poor recreations of its Wikipedia page."

"Mm, but I have a cunning plan," said Clara, "I'll just check everything against Wikipedia and Spark Notes. I can still tell if they've read it. And besides, at least it'll force them to read a synopsis, so they'll learn _something_ if they've copied it out by hand."

"You could try teaching them what happens in the book?" the Doctor suggested. Clara glared at her.

"It's easier if they actually read it."

"Yeah, but, it's just events."

"Them already having read it makes more time for other things."

"Like mock exams."

" _No_. Like… alright, fine, like mocks, sometimes – but also _historical context_. Which reminds me, I need your help with a lesson plan about segregation."

"Didn't I help you with that last year?"

"Yeah, but… I lost the notes."

"Did you lose the notes, Clara?" she challenged, "Or is this an excuse to spend time with me?"

"Pfft. I don't need an excuse to spend time with my wife. I suppose I haven't looked particularly hard for the notes, but really, when something's lost, it's lost."

"Like the spark in our marriage."

"Exactly. What would be the point in trying to find that again? It vanished a long time ago. A bit like my notes on _To Kill a Mockingbird_."

"I can't believe you think coming up with historical notes on Harper Lee is an acceptable pretence for trying to touch me inappropriately."

"What would be an acceptable pretence? Out of interest?" she asked unconvincingly. The Doctor shook her head.

"Gee, I don't know – just ask me outright?"

"I can't do that. What if Mattie heard?"

"You think Mattie doesn't know what's going on when you say stuff like, 'Come and help me think of literary commentary in our bedroom and make sure to lock the door, because the literary commentary is just _that_ exciting?' She's not stupid."

"Alright, well, next time how about I just yell, 'sex' and point upstairs?"

"Awesome – cutting straight to it, I love it. And then I can yell 'divorce' and point at the door."

"I will leave you one day. Find someone who's actually nice to me." The Doctor laughed.

"Coo, we both know, you don't want me to always be nice to you."

"Yeah, well, maybe I've got issues," Clara said, "Maybe I've got some deep-seated neuroses or self-hatred, and that's why I like it when you say so many awful things."

"Don't we all? Besides, you're not _that_ screwed up. Now, River, on the other hand? And her handcuffs? Whips? _That's_ neuroses for you."

"…Who was wearing the handcuffs, exactly?"

"I cannot divulge that information."

"It was you, wasn't it?"

"It's classified."

"Definitely you. You've never asked _me_ to handcuff you."

"It's more her thing. I'm just, uh… willing to compromise. This isn't your way of telling me you want to get some handcuffs, is it…? Because they chafe."

"Erm, no. I'll just stick with us insulting each other. That's enough verbal intercourse for the moment."

"Gross! Did you just say 'verbal intercourse'!? That has to be the _worst_ phrase anybody has ever come up with."

"Untrue."

"What's the worst phrase?"

"'Ofsted inspection'. 'Income tax'. 'I love you, will you marry me'."

"That last one? Really?"

"Sends a chill down my spine every time I hear it."

"I guess next time I'll say, 'Put on the damn ring, woman.' Probably make your knees go weak."

"You are complete and utter filth, I hope you know," Clara told her curtly.

"Filth are my politics, filth is my life."

"Shit. I _might_ be in love with you."

"My pleasure."

" _Shit_."

"What? You're… still in love with me?"

"No, seriously, _shit_ , look, ahead, at the station," Clara pointed.

Buckingham Central loomed out of the shadows, the train tunnel mouth opening up into the large cavern with its six platforms and dozen storefronts. Only now, it was overrun with plant life. Harvest-coloured leaves sprouted from the roots, drooping like vines from the high ceiling, forcing their way into the derelict shopfronts. None of that compared to what was right in the centre of the station, however; an enormous tree trunk, so vast it had broken through to the streets high above, though the mess of roots prevented any sunlight from reaching the underground. This largest tree burrowed into the concrete with more vast roots snaking out and into the surrounding tunnels.

That was when they saw their first kidnapping. A root twitched and retracted itself like a rubber band snapping, wrapping itself like a python around another human being, who didn't appear to be conscious. It happened too quickly for Clara to step in and do anything, and the root dragged its prey towards the central tree and then through a crevice in the ground and out of sight. It was a little like watching a chameleon catch a bug. The Doctor took off in pursuit, dragging Clara by the hand along with her.

"Let's follow it," she said.

"Erm, where?" asked Clara as they headed straight down the tracks towards the tree. The ground broke apart around the trunk, leaving passages deeper underground accessible. It was through these gaps they were apparently going to descend.

"Down! See where it's taking people! This is it, Coo, it's gotta be. This is the biggest tree I've ever seen in my life, and we went and saw General Sherman, do you remember?"

"No, what's General Sherman?"

"Earth's biggest tree. It's in California. Come to think of it, it might've been Amy I was with… but this one is _bigger_. Whatever we're looking for, I'll wager it's directly below this monster. The only question is how far below?"


	19. Invasive Species - Chapter 7

_Invasive Species_

 _7_

Beneath the underground tunnels was a whole other layer, a crisscrossing maze of intricate and almost impossibly narrow passages, just big enough to fit a person through one at a time. Walls lined with living, breathing, claustrophobic roots. Clara inched through the tunnels keeping a tight grip on the Doctor, terrified that they were going to crush them to death with a moment's notice; for that reason, she was staying ready to turn them intangible as quickly as possible, in spite of the Doctor's protests about her distaste for walking through walls.

"Why do we always end up underground?" Clara grumbled, having to walk almost sideways as she was pulled through the darkness by Thirteen, who was holding the only torch. "Baby-Faced Fletch lived underground, the doorway to the Unnameable was underground, and now this ridiculous tree-lair is underground."

"Not sure where else you'd expect a tree-lair to be."

"I don't know. In the branches, in the sky? Because, right, science, yeah…" she paused.

"Your reason is 'because, right, science, yeah'?"

"No, I'm thinking… okay, so, trees… they get food through the leaves, right? And the branches? So why wouldn't the kidnapped people be in the branches?"

"Coo, I'm going to ask you a question, and I need you to answer me honestly – what grade did you get in your Biology GCSE?"

"Okay, first of all, I sat my Biology GCSE at least sixty years ago. Second of all, I got a C. I know all the important stuff."

"The important stuff being, what? Genitals?"

"Yes, exactly. Not plants. When would knowing about the anatomy of a plant ever come in useful?"

"I don't know, how about _at this exact moment_? Also, you teach English! That's the ultimate useless subject. It's all made-up. At least in History, the things actually happened. Like, Winston Churchill _did_ say all those racist things about Indian people. But Puck did not say all those _hilarious_ things about rich Athenians, because he's not real. And you need to start sitting in on Cameron's lessons – they absorb sunlight through the leaves, they get nutrients through the roots. So the people are going to be down here, _with the roots_."

"Well, you _say_ that," Clara began, having to walk sideways to fit through the passage, "But I've always got you to know things for me."

"And what about when you don't have me? Like, what if I'm somewhere else? I might go to watch a movie you don't want to see, and obviously since I respect your choice to not see a movie if you don't want to, well, I wouldn't be there. It would be a dire situation with no recourse."

"Here I thought you were going to say what if you died, or something. Why can't I just go to the cinema and get you?"

"Because! That would be _rude_. You can't just walk into a movie halfway through, what's the matter with you?" Clara rolled her eyes, not that the Doctor could actually see her.

"This is a stupid conversation, I always go with you to the cinema, even if I don't like the film. How am I supposed to appropriately critique something without having seen it? I need to know which bits to make fun of you for enjoying, specifically."

"Oh, you are _so_ thoughtful."

"My point is-"

"I didn't realise you were making a point."

"-if the trees eat through their roots-"

"Which, they do."

"-then _where_ are the – EURGH!" she shrieked and jumped backwards, but this was impossible in the cramped crawlspace, so she wound up banging her head against a root and no further away than the horror which had triggered her outburst.

"What?" the Doctor turned, alarmed. As she did, she cast the full beam of her torch across a ghastly, human face only just visible protruding through the limbs around them. "Well whaddaya know, you just answered your own question. _There's_ a person, in the roots."

"Fuck!" she exclaimed, "Is he dead!?"

"I don't know – hold this," the Doctor handed her the torch and awkwardly fumbled while she retrieved her sonic screwdriver. The gap was so thin she couldn't lift her arms up all the way, making just reaching into her own pockets tricky. Clara found herself trying not to look for any more faces or body parts sticking out of the walls. The Doctor scanned the face with the purple-lighted sonic and listened carefully. "He's alive. Suffering from symptoms of sustained blood loss. I'd say he's been here a few days. But that's good, that means there's a big chance of being able to rescue people."

"Why is he unconscious?"

"Probably anaesthetised. If they panic they'll lose blood quicker because their hearts beat faster. Keeping them calm keeps the trees in control," she explained her hypothesis. "Also to stop them from escaping, like how Venus flytraps are sticky, I guess. These roots look awfully strong…"

"What do we do? Free him? I could phase him out?" Clara suggested.

"And then what would we do with him? Leave him here in this passage? They'll pick him back up again as soon as we're gone, and he won't make it to the exit without being retrieved."

"So we're just supposed to leave him here? And however many thousands of others are also embedded in the walls?" Clara challenged her.

"We don't know that there's not some sort of… failsafe. What if pulling him out of the tree is like taking him off life-support, ripping out IVs? There has to be something in there to keep him asleep _and_ withdraw blood."

"Like what? Tiny, wooden syringes?"

"What I'm imagining isn't _dissimilar_ to tiny, wooden syringes," said the Doctor, "We need to leave him, keep moving. Destroy the heart, locus, life-source, whatever, of these trees. C'mon." Clara didn't move, so the Doctor softened her tone considerably and touched her arm. "Coo, this is the best way to help. The ends justify the means."

"You know it was Machiavelli who said that, and he was talking about dictators using any means necessary to maintain control of their subjects."

"I think you'll find it was me who said that, and Machiavelli overheard me and liked it so much he made it part of his little 'ideology,'" she explained, taking the torch back from Clara and holding her hand again so that they could proceed, leaving the plant-prisoner behind to live on in the walls, like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. "He really has no scruples."

"What did you expect?"

"It's not like I was there to talk to him, I wanted to hang out with Leo. Anyway, he ended up accusing me of murdering Medici, so, y'know, that happened. It was a _long_ time ago. I actually came up with that phrase back in school, I was arguing with somebody about this ad hoc experiment I was doing involving a black hole machine – sort of the Time Lord equivalent of mixing Mentos and Diet Coke. There was this whole _explosion_ and _maybe_ the fabric of reality as we know it was a _little bit_ threatened – but I fixed it! And I was like you know what? The ends justify the means."

"Right. And what were the ends, exactly?"

"I learnt not to build black hole machines for fun. Only when necessary."

"I'm so glad you didn't get a job in the science department sometimes…"

"You never know, maybe they'll put the Renaissance on the syllabus. I can tell everybody my Machiavelli-accusing-me-of-murdering-Giuliano-de-Medici-and-the-Pope anecdote."

"Mm, you do that. I'll be sure to visit whatever institution they throw you in. Remind me _not_ to ask you for help historicising the Renaissance."

"Do you even have any non-Shakespeare Renaissance texts to study?"

"Not right now. Maybe I'll throw in a bit of John Ford. Incest, baby eating, vilification of Catholicism – all that good stuff."

"You have fun with that."

"I'll ask Tom what he thinks. In fact, I won't ask Tom what he thinks, because I know as soon as I bring up _Whore_ , he's going to start talking about _Malfi_ , like they're somehow equivalent. Best to forget the whole thing."

"I would personally like to forget the existence of both of…" she slowed to a halt.

"What?" The Doctor took her elbow and pulled her a foot or so further, pointing out another face in the root-mesh. Unlike the last one, however, this one was sickeningly familiar: it was Jakub. Clara didn't say a word as the Doctor drew out her screwdriver once again, checking him over.

"He's alive. Also suffering symptoms of blood loss, but not as progressed as the other guy."

"Right, so, they're down here in a random order?" Clara asked, "You'd think it would be a last one in, first one out kind of deal."

"I'm not gonna pretend I understand how these trees store their food. It could be alphabetised, for all we know. Or it could be… to do with iron content? Maybe the deeper they are, the more nutritional?"

"We can't leave Jake here," said Clara.

"We've got even more problems if we try to free Jake than if we try to free anybody else. If he wakes up, he'll recognise us, and then our cover's blown. We're meant to be laying low, not advertising the fact we protect the world from alien threats. And besides, the passage is way too narrow to carry him, and we can't just leave him on the floor here."

"Great. So, once again, 'the ends justify the means.'"

"We don't know that taking him out won't kill him while the trees are still alive. Do you really think that's a risk we should take? And then haul him around with us, retcon him if he wakes up? I don't like using retcon at the best of times, let alone on teenagers with their developing brains, and especially not ones who smoke pot. I don't know how marijuana interacts with powerful, selective amnesia drugs." Clara didn't speak, she was thinking, trying to come up with a very convincing rebuttal to the Doctor's many, salient points. "Okay. I'll show you what I'll do." She started searching through their bag again, fumbling for a while until withdrawing a stick of chalk. She showed the chalk to Clara and then used it to mark a large 'X' on one of the roots wrapping around Jake. The white 'X' stood out quite well against all the blacks and browns of the underground. "Now we'll be able to find him right away on our way back out. I could even wedge a glowstick in there, if you want?"

"Do you have glowsticks?"

"Always. In case of an emergency."

"What kind of an emergency? Like, we have to go to a rave?" Clara asked incredulously.

"No. They're very useful."

"For raves."

"Not for raves – do you want a glowstick or not?"

"Do you have any water?"

"Not at the moment."

"Alright. So, glowsticks are vital supplies, but water-"

"I haven't restocked! We drink the water, but we don't use the glowsticks."

"Do you think that might be evidence to the effect that the glowsticks _aren't_ vital supplies?"

"You know what?" she was annoyed now. She took the bag from her shoulder again and searched through it until drawing out a glowstick. She cracked it and the green illumination spread out from the centre. "Are you happy now?" she brandished it in Clara's face, who leant away. Then she wedged it in the tree trunks above the 'X'. There was no way they'd lose Jake now.

"That has to be the most passive-aggressive glowstick-cracking in history."

"Oh, you think that was passive? That was not passive. That was full, unadulterated _aggression_ , Oswald."

"Wow. I am _shitting myself_. You are truly a force to be reckoned with."

"You are _such_ a waste of my time. I don't know why I bother with you. Come on, I'm getting tired of these close quarters; sooner we escape, the better. Put some distance between us." They kept walking, the Doctor wondering if that was maybe a bit _too_ harsh when Clara didn't come up with a response – though she stood by the glowsticks coming in handy. What if they needed to mark a trail, Hansel and Gretel style? Or they were somewhere dark but ran out of batteries.

"Hey," Clara interrupted her thoughts on the many applications of glowsticks, "There was something on the news about UNIT showing up."

"Doesn't surprise me."

"Well… alright, colour me stupid, but I thought UNIT disbanded, like, decades ago. I remember when you regenerated and we ran into them in the library, there were less than half a dozen. They were less important than Undercoll. And now, they're being called out in force?"

"They're having a resurgence. During the Manifest Crisis, they were deemed inept and replaced by the Hazard Control Corps, okay? The HCC was specifically to deal with the Manifests. The British government would have shut them down altogether, but since they technically operate as a part of the UN, there's UN legislation in place meaning all the member states _have_ to have an active UNIT sect. But in 2029, your wonderful sister managed to finally synthesise a widespread cure for the existing Manifests. After sixteen years the Crisis ended and the HCC dwindled and disappeared less than a decade later – I guess you guys taking down their megalomaniac leader really did a number on them. So the Manifests are gone, but alien threats persist, as you can see by this… whole thing. The crown doesn't really want to give Undercoll more power, so they re-invest in UNIT, and for the last thirty-ish years they've been building up a presence again."

"Huh. Then who's in charge of them? Not Kate, surely? She'd be ancient, like, a hundred."

"Yeah, um, I'm pretty sure she died…"

"Oh."

"I don't know who's in charge. Maybe it's another Lethbridge-Stewart? They could be building a dynasty – a hundred years of dominance over the extra-terrestrial intelligence service. I've just been hanging out with you all this time, I've sort of lost touch with my favourite branch of the military industrial complex."

"You've been 'hanging out' with me?"

"Yeah. It's a low-key thing, y'know?"

"Right."

"Nothing heavy. No commitment." Clara laughed a little. "I freeze up at the thought of commitment, so if we can keep things light and breezy for the time being, that'd be swell."

"Light and breezy like our mortgage, contract salaries and teenage ward?"

"Nothing says 'chill' like a series of legally binding agreements. Honestly, though, you might have something there. About UNIT, I mean. I should probably look into them, see exactly what they're about these days. Might come in handy if they ever get wind of an attractive, alien teacher and her equally attractive, superpowered wife hiding out in Brighton. Didn't Oswin delete all record of you from their databases?"

"Pfft," Clara just scoffed, "Like I have any idea what Oswin does. She could have, I suppose, it would be sensible since I'm an unregistered Manifest. Makes me very dangerous and volatile that I don't have a clandestine paramilitary group tracking my every move in an effort to stop me from killing everyone, and/or biologically reproducing and passing on 'the gene,'" she did inverted quotation marks with her fingers. The authorities were absolutely petrified of those Manifests who had not been cured in 2029 reproducing, since the Manifest DNA corruption was hereditary after someone developed the initial mutation.

"Hey," the Doctor whispered, "I think I see something up ahead."

"Better be a way out of these bloody tunnels."

"I wouldn't bank on it, Coo…"

The Doctor was right. The web of underground tunnels did all lead to one, central point, directly beneath the main tube station, and the abomination they found could certainly be described as similar to a heart. A vast, pulsating shape, the same width as the gigantic tree towering over the city, was suspended in an enormous cavern by a thousand blood-sucking roots. The roots worked like arteries, feeding the mass as it grew and oozed, coagulated blood dripping down from its porous, organic surface. It must be at least a hundred metres across, the pair of them like ants by comparison. And _that_ was the alien entity trying to take over Brighton? That was what they were supposed to be destroying?

"That _thing_ grew out of the dust from the meteor shower?" Clara asked, staring up at it. So they kidnapped people were stored in the tunnel walls, roots burrowing into the skin, and their blood was taken to feed the 'heart.' They stood on a precarious ledge overlooking the chamber, the sphere hanging in front of them. If they fell, that would be it, the drop was too far to survive.

"It sure looks that way."

"Well, great. How long until the roots start attacking, then?" The Doctor didn't answer. "Do you have a plan? Apart from, I don't know, throwing glowsticks at it? Shooting it with deodorant flamethrowers?"

"We should have brought some explosives… see, this is why you shouldn't have forbidden me from keeping TNT in the house."

"If you'll remember correctly," Clara began, "I initially did not forbid it – it was only after the incident where you put a stick of dynamite in the downstairs toilet 'for a joke' that that rule came into effect. It still doesn't flush properly, even after getting it fixed."

"Okay, so I made _one_ mistake, big deal." Clara rolled her eyes. "Let's brain storm."

"This is the problem with improvising everything – you need to come up with better plans. 'Plan rigorously, but allow for happy accidents.'"

The Doctor scoffed, "What idiot said that?"

"David Lynch."

"Oh, and you think David Lynch _plans_ things? The sixth season finale of the third _Twin Peaks_ revival speaks for itself, Clara." Clara cleared her throat and then pointed at the gigantic tree monster. " _Now_ you want my ideas? You don't wanna call David Lynch, see what he thinks?"

"Very funny. You know he has my number blocked because I asked him to explain _Mulholland Drive_ to me. Don't need to go rubbing salt into the wound."

"Alright, alright… it's a heart, so, all we need to do is stop it. Or disconnect it. This thing is what's controlling and feeding all the trees on the surface – we already established they don't photosynthesise. Without an attachment to this brain-thing, all the other trees will die."

"Is it a heart or a brain?"

"A brain-heart."

"Brain-fart?"

"I'll show _you_ a brain-fart… jerk…" she muttered.

"What you're saying is we need to rip out _all_ of these roots?"

"Hypothetically speaking. I don't see how we could feasibly-" Clara held out her hand towards the blob and one of the roots tore itself violently free. It flailed in the air, spewing blood like a severed tentacle. "No, Coo, I don't think that's a good-" A second root tore itself away from the sphere. "Clara," the Doctor said firmly, "That's dangerous. Two, three roots, sure – but there's over a hundred, and they're still moving, you can't-"

"I think it's actually you who worries too much."

"The telekinesis is dangerous, you know that, that's why you don't use it for things like this – do you want another aneurysm?"

"No, of course I don't want an aneurysm, but I also don't want the two-thousand people down here and the other ten-billion people up _there_ to die," she said, psychically ripping out another root. They were both right. Killing that thing would be an extreme and deadly exertion, but without a bomb, without the Lightning Girl, without the Bad Wolf, at that moment 'the Phantom' was the only hope they had to eradicate the trees.

"I really think I might be able to use these glowsticks to throw together some kind of IED-"

"First of all, that's ridiculous; second of all, even if it _wasn't_ ridiculous, I don't think detonating a bomb in these very fragile tunnels is a good idea," Clara said, pulling out a fourth and a fifth. It reminded her strangely of all the blackhead videos she had been watching that very morning, and the 'heart' was just a gigantic, acne-ridden face. "We could bring the whole city crashing down." Soon she had ripped ten roots away, causing the mass to ripple like bubbles were popping on its veneer. But while pulling the roots out wasn't too difficult, the real trouble was keeping them from latching on again. It was a constant battle as she kept snapping them to stop this, and incrementally the amount of energy Clara was exerting rose and rose and rose.

"Uh, worried as I am, my darling, we sort of have another problem," the Doctor interrupted while Clara tried to focus. The Doctor was backing away from half a dozen tendrils coming out of the walls, defenceless except for her aerosols and lighters. Clara sent a blast of telekinetic energy at them, knocking them away for the time being, but within seconds they were regrouping to come in for the attack.

"Get over here and let me phase you."

"What? Let you hurt yourself even more? This is risky enough already! I couldn't-" A root struck for her. Clara dropped what she was doing with the heart and grabbed the Doctor's wrist, dragging her out of the way (once again) and turning her intangible in the process. "They're going back for the thing!" Thirteen pointed at the heart. Clara's attention was split between trying to keep them both from getting mauled and trying to kill the trees. "This is _such_ a bad idea!"

"You're supposed to be supportive of me, you know! This is hard!"

"Well – I – gah! Okay, okay – just, take deep breaths, focus, uh, push?"

" _Push_? Push what!?"

"It's just what people say in movies!"

"In labour scenes, maybe – I'm getting a headache."

"Focus on the trees, we have to save the city. _You_ have to save the city. I mean, not to put a lot of pressure on you or give you any, uh, performance anxiety, but… you got this, is what I'm trying to say, if these trees would stop attacking me," the Doctor spoke very haphazardly because the roots kept striking and then sailing straight through her body, which was a nauseating feeling. She would never understand how Clara could stomach intangibility without flinching. "Are you feeling supported yet?" Clara was trying to focus. "Um… do you remember when we went to Akhaten and you did that thing with the leaf? Well, this is just like that, only on a smaller scale. And you did that, so you can do this super easy. Or, maybe not _super_ easy, but relatively easy? A certain degree of ease? It's possible, is my point. I hope it's possible. I mean – what am I saying? You can do _anything_ you put your mind to. Achieve your dreams! That's why we have feminism, right? Just think of the big tree heart like it's the patriarchy and you're crushing it using your mind because you're, erm, a strong independent woman. Or something like that. I always find the key to success is visualisation, so, just visualise yourself winning and you're bound to win, winner. Just like Charlie Sheen, although, maybe not _exactly_ like Charlie Sheen… you know, I think that was a bad comparison to make. At the end of the day, you're in charge of your own narrative, and you need to take back control. From the big tree thing. Show it who's boss! You know what they say, when life gives you trees, make tree-ade. I swear I used to be better at impromptu speeches – oh, jeez, I think you made it angry."

The blob was now writhing in the air as Clara plucked the roots out one by one. Soon enough it would be too heavy for the remaining roots to support it, and it would go crashing to the ground. But Clara fell to her knees.

"You are doing _so_ great, Coo," the Doctor resumed whatever nonsense she had been spewing, sure that Clara wasn't actually listening to her words and just wanted the sound of her voice. "Just stick at it, we'll be done in no time. That is to say, _you'll_ be done in no time, because you're the real hero; I'm only here to provide moral support, witty repartee, and somewhat outdated pop culture references. But you're on fire. Going for gold. All the medals, in fact, even the last place medals – not that you're in last place, and not that they even give medals for last place, but you'll have a whole shelf of participation trophies, I'm sure. I'll make you a trophy. We can get an entire cabinet of trophies just as soon as you put this tree in the ground for good. Deeper in the ground, obviously we're already in the ground…" Clara's nose began to bleed. "Keep calm and focused, okay? We're one mind about this, I think. And your mind, or brain, is going to be fine, you're definitely not going to have a haemorrhage. Whatever you do, don't think about haemorrhages, or think about much at all – except for the tree, which we need to kill. _You_ need to kill. Am I pressuring you too much?" Clara did not reply, scrunching up her face in concentration. Roots thrashed in the air around them, unable to re-attach themselves, unable to strike their assailants.

The walls began to rumble around them. Ripping out the roots was making the already-precarious tunnel system even more unstable. The Doctor dreaded to think what would happen when the bleeding heart fell to the ground, the thing looked more than a little heavy. Watching it struggle dimly reminded her of watching the stern of the _Titanic_ as it sank beneath the sea, even if it was only comparable by sheer scale.

"You're _so close_ ," she said, raising her voice over the sound of the trembling earth, "You can _do this_. I believe in you, more than I've ever believed in anything or anyone. Who cares about the dumb Lightning Girl? There's only one superhero I'm interested in, and that's the Phantom. But only this half of the Phantom, not that other, lame half who can't go out in the daylight. The better half. The better half who can single-handedly thwart an…" another large rumble, more tentacles broke under the strain of having to hold up the mass. The Doctor continued as one by one they snapped. "…An entire, uh, alien invasion. All on her own. And that's you. So, just-"

"GET OUT OF THE WAY!" An electric blue flash of light momentarily blinded the Doctor, and an almighty force knocked both her and Clara backwards towards the tunnel mouth. The heart was finally no longer able to sustain itself; it went tumbling as all the remaining, tenuous roots broke at once. In front of them a large piece of the collapsing ceiling landed at the edge of the ledge, right where they had been kneeling a second ago. Clara was unconscious, slumped against the Doctor's shoulder, while the last line of defence between them and the dying trees was none other than the Lightning Girl.

"Nice of you to show up!" the Doctor said loudly over the cacophony around them.

"Forgive me for being intrigued by sudden reports of _killer trees_ in _Brighton_ ," Esther argued, "What the heck is going on here!?" The Doctor didn't reply, instead observing the chaos. The heart crashed into the base of its chamber, rendered an amorphic mess of pulp. It was dead on impact, and with it the swarms of animated roots blackened and wilted. The attack ended, the rumbling quelled, and luckily the cave they were in managed to stop itself from collapsing. The Doctor's attention returned to her wife.

"Clara? Are you okay?" she lifted Clara's head, but Clara's eyes were closed and her face was covered in blood from her own nosebleed. The Doctor took a deep breath and placed her fingers on Clara's neck to check for a pulse. Luckily, there was one there. Weak, but detectable. "I told you you'd give yourself another aneurysm…" she said quietly, holding Clara's unconscious form in her arms. "Maybe I was _too_ supportive…"

"Seriously," Esther reiterated, pacing in front of her. "You should have called me if there was something like this going on. Instead, I get a text from Mattie seeing if I could come and help out! You know I always have time to help you guys out, you're family."

"We managed," said the Doctor, "Sort of. And you were busy, you're supposed to be in San Francisco, dealing with some _other_ earthquake."

"It's mainly just handing out water and blankets," she explained. The Doctor had never actually seen the Lightning Girl in person – well, not in her costume, that was; Esther did still visit them, when she took a break from her vigilante duties. It was, of course, of Oswin's design, skin-tight, bulletproof spandex, a flame-retardant cape with hood and a _very_ fancy mask; it was all glass and had digital, blue images on it, dancing shapes. Probably full of all sorts of gadgets as well as battery reserves to make sure Esther never ran out of her famous lightning.

"Who are you supposed to be? Robot Rorschach?"

"I mean, kind of. Rorschach-slash-Spoiler. Slash Quarian. Had to give Os a lot of reference images… are you going to tell me what's going on? Explain why you're living the plot of _Devil May Cry 5_?" Esther's voice was being altered by a modulator in the mask she was wearing, but her accent remained plainly discernible. She was still plenty recognisable to the people who actually knew her.

"The fast version is that tiny seeds landed here in a meteor shower a week ago, and they've been down here growing into that _thing_ Clara just destroyed all this time. They're alien trees that survive by drinking blood and the tunnels are filled with roughly two-thousand kidnapped but, thankfully, still alive victims. We only found out about this whole _thing_ a few hours ago, the trees sprang up practically overnight. And we've been busy – Mattie's first week of school."

"Oh, really? How is she?"

"She's okay, I think. Apart from, you know, the threat of carnivorous, blood-sucking trees." Clara made an unintelligible noise and enveloped the Doctor's attention again. "It's okay, Coo, I'm right here, you're safe. The Lightning Girl came to rescue us."

"You were almost crushed," Esther argued, "By that big, falling boulder."

"She was phasing us," said the Doctor, stroking Clara's hair.

"Is it over?"

"It should be. She disconnected the heart and killed it. Although…"

"What?"

"You don't happen to have a crack-team of emergency landscapers on speed-dial, do you? Not sure who's going to clean up this mess."

"No, I don't. But I think you two should get out of here, before-"

" _GO, GO, GO!_ "

A swarm of black-clad, red-beret-wearing soldiers came pouring out of the tunnel onto the really _very_ narrow ledge, half a dozen of them armed with flamethrowers. Esther flitted out of their way, doing her borderline-teleporting, travel-at-lightspeed thing. It was UNIT, of course.

"You guys are right on time," said the Doctor, "By which I mean, late. As usual. You can point those guns somewhere else, too." She began to get to her feet, lifting Clara with her, who was woozy but just about regaining consciousness. Esther, still fully disguised, came to help her.

"Identify yourself," one of the soldiers asked. They were all wearing masks with breathing apparatus attached, leaving her with no way to easily discern between them.

"Me? I'm the Doctor. And I'm sure you're all familiar with the Lightning Girl."

"Ma'am, we have a Code Doctor and a Code Bolt. The immediate alien threat has been neutralised," the same soldier said into a headset.

"Code Bolt? Is that me?" asked Esther.

"Why am I just 'Code Doctor'? You know, you've always been _very_ unimaginative. I always said that – especially about the Greyhound thing. Greyhound One, Greyhound Two, Greyhound Six." Clara made another noise. "Who'd you call on your radio? The new Greyhound One? We were just wondering who was calling the shots." A newcomer approached from the tunnel. "And whaddaya know, it's…" But she couldn't even take the time to think of something smart, she was overcome with shock. A girl had just entered, relatively young, perhaps only thirty. This girl was wearing thick-framed glasses, a multicoloured scarf, cricketing whites, a bowtie, and a tweed jacket. The soldiers all lowered their weapons and stood to attention.

"Oh. My. God."

"Wow," said the Doctor, "It's like looking in a… not quite a mirror, but… it's like looking at something, that's for sure…"

"You're the Doctor!"

"Correct."

"You regenerated."

"A long time ago."

"Into a _girl_."

"That would appear to be the case."

"An _American_!"

"Unfortunately. And you would be…?"

"I'm your biggest fan!"

"I'm flattered, truly…"

"And I'm Osgood."

"You're… wait, what? Os _good_?"

" _Oswin_ …" Clara mumbled.

"No, she said Os- _good_ ," Esther corrected.

"Petronella Osgood. I'm sure we've met!" she said buoyantly, "Ages ago. Fifty years, maybe."

"Hold on, but – but you don't look like – that's your _real name_? And you're in charge? Of these clowns?" she nodded at the soldiers.

"I used to work with Kate Stewart, tinkering."

"Huh. And, how old are you, exactly?"

"Older than I look."

"So's everyone else I know… What's your deal? What's your thing?" the Doctor questioned, very suspicious.

"That's right!" Esther exclaimed, "I knew I recognised that name. I've heard Ravenwood talk about her. Not this her, I'm sure, but a version of her in another universe. Something to do with Zygons."

"Zygons?" frowned the Doctor, then turned back to 'Osgood', "Do you know any Zygons?"

"I know _of_ Zygons. I've never met any."

"We really need to confer more closely about the parallel universes," the Doctor added aside to Esther, who nodded in agreement. "So, you were Kate's PA?"

"A long time ago," she said, "And then I met Splodge." She rolled up her sleeve and revealed something the Doctor had not seen for a very long time, a creature wrapped around her forearm and latched onto her skin. It was like she was covered in blue slime that was half fused to her limb, but the Doctor knew exactly what it was.

"That's a Scek," she said, "You need to get that thing removed, they'll alter your biology in completely unpredictable ways."

"Splodge is my friend."

"A _Scek_? You're friends with a Scek? It's a parasite," the Doctor persisted, "You should not have let it attach itself to you, those things are like barnacles, they're almost impossible to get rid of. In fact, they have a habit of poisoning their hosts if they try to remove them."

"I wouldn't remove Splodge, he's like, my companion. Like you have companions."

"Yeah, it's literally nothing like that. But, sure, if you want to gamble away your life in exchange for eternal youth and dominance over a paramilitary group, then who am I to criticise?" The Doctor wholly disapproved of Osgood using a bond with a Scek to keep herself alive. They were known to force their hosts to do all kinds of unsavoury things in the promise of 'gifts,' gifts which were generally biological mutations much more harmful than just immortality. Like growing extra organs where there shouldn't be extra organs. The Doctor had once seen a Scek host die of a heart attack because the Scek grew them five additional hearts and their cardiovascular system imploded. And to put someone like that in charge of UNIT?

"I have tattoos of you."

"You _what_?"

"Who has a tattoo?" Clara mumbled.

"Just of your face. Not this face, your old faces," Osgood 'explained.'

"I've never felt so simpatico with Britney than at this very moment," said the Doctor, haunted by the idea of someone she'd never met having tattoos of her face.

"And I thought some of the things I read in my Twitter mentions were weird," Esther joked.

"We've met before," Osgood addressed Esther now, "Years ago. Before you were… you know."

"Excuse me?"

"When you were in UNIT custody."

"Those records don't exist anymore," said Esther firmly, though the Doctor could sense she was worried.

"But my memories do. What's your name? Ethel?"

"Yes," she lied, "And I guess your friend there makes you Eddie Brock."

"Makes me who?" Osgood asked.

"Eddie Brock. Y'know, Venom."

"Oh. I'm not into comics. They're kind of uncool."

"Enough about Sparky," the Doctor interjected before Esther went on a tirade how comic books were anything but uncool (which she had definitely been about to do), "We've sorted the tree problem now, you have my wife to thank for that-"

"You're married?" Osgood asked, sounding slightly disappointed. At least her not knowing who Clara was meant that Clara had been right earlier when she said Oswin had deleted all trace of them from UNIT's database.

" _Yes_. You could make yourself useful by rescuing all the people trapped in the walls out there. Should be about two-thousand, give or take. Start cleaning up this mess and getting them back home."

"Okay!" she said brightly, then turned to the soldiers, "The Doctor gave you an order."

"What? No, I didn't – I wouldn't give anybody an – oh, they're saluting…" she was dismayed to be saluted. "Could you let us leave first? We have somebody in the tunnels we need to grab."

"The glowstick boy?" Osgood asked.

"Yeah. The glowstick boy. I need to get my wife back to the TARDIS," she said, not wanting UNIT and their super-fan leader to get wind that she was living in Brighton; the last thing she needed was house calls from them. The soldiers stepped aside to allow the Doctor and Esther, carrying Clara between them, to leave through the narrow passages. It was going to be a _very_ tight squeeze, so she hoped Clara would wake up soon. "It was nice to meet you," she told Osgood awkwardly. Osgood went bright red and made a strange noise. "Make sure these people are safe, or you'll have me to deal with. And that's _not_ a good thing."

"Of course they'll be safe with us, we're UNIT."

"Yeah. Sure. I'll see you around, Petronella."

"She said my name!" Osgood exclaimed to the nearest soldier.

"Very good, ma'am," said the soldier curtly.

"Come on, _Ethel_ ," the Doctor lowered her voice, entering the tunnel, "Let's get out of here. And keep your eyes open for a husky and a pair of cats."


	20. Invasive Species - Chapter 8

_Invasive Species_

 _8_

Matilda had left to go and get dressed as soon as Clara and the Doctor had disappeared on their underground adventure. Trying not to worry about whether or not they would actually return from this escapade – as seasoned as they were, she could not help it – she took the time to get ready like it was just a regular day. When she returned, no more than twenty minutes later, she found Stefani in the living room examining every object she could get her hands on.

The novelty of the lobster tank was one thing, with his _SpongeBob_ decorations and tiny, Scooby-Doo action figure, but there were many more oddities. And the things in the living room weren't even close to the strangest things the Oswalds owned, _those_ were relegated to the transdimensional library upstairs. There were all kinds of relics stashed up there: alien books, ancient tomes, all of Clara's fragile, first editions; an enormous grand piano Clara said had been gifted to her by Chopin; a graffiti painting they claimed was a genuine Banksy he had given to them as a wedding gift, though Mattie was not privy to the whole story (yet); and then all the machines the Doctor spent her nights tinkering with when she wasn't in their bedroom. The strangest thing was probably the 'ghost in a jar' up there, which they said had been recovered by Sally Sparrow and Esther many years ago and held Marilyn Monroe's tormented spirit. Matilda had never witnessed a manifestation of Marilyn Monroe, much as she would like to, so wasn't sure how much truth there was in the story – though she was forbidden from watching old MGM films in the house, in case it 'agitated the ghost.' That was a shame.

But that was upstairs. Steph was, thankfully, _downstairs_ , and crouching on the floor in front of the television examining the Doctor's VCR. On top of it was a stack of cryptically labelled tapes. Mattie knew from asking her about them earlier in the week that they were mainly just very rare recordings of old cartoons, and the Doctor had been watching a _Batfink_ one repeatedly claiming to be looking for subliminal messages (she had yet to discover any.) There was a DVD player down there too – she knew it had a copy of _Paris is Burning_ in it belonging to Clara. In the library was an incredibly old projector 'acquired' from a 1930s cinema, but they hadn't told her the details of how it had come into their possession (it was almost definitely stolen.)

"Are these, like, _videos_?" asked Steph. Mattie wasn't surprised she'd never seen them before – _she_ had barely seen them before, she'd been born in 2014. Steph, on the other hand, must have only been born in 2058, since she kept reminding Clara how she was sixteen in October.

"The Doctor's really into, like, vintage media equipment," Matilda explained, "In the van they have a tape deck. She has a phonograph upstairs somewhere, a proper antique one."

"Should sell it, she'd be rich," said Steph, picking up the video on top of the pile and sitting down on the floor. The TV above her was on but was muted and only playing the news coverage of Brighton's tree invasion. It was a series of overhead, helicopter shots. Mattie couldn't believe how bad it had gotten overnight, all of the roads were completely blocked. The caption written on the video Steph held was: _Walter Reuther Sucks_. "Who's Walter Reuther?"

"He's, um…" she tried to remember what the Doctor had said when she had asked the very same question a few nights ago, "Like, an activist, or something? From a hundred years ago."

"And this is a video of him?"

"No, it's an old episode of _Batfink_ – she's looking for anti-Reuther propaganda she heard is hidden in it," she struggled to remember, "The Doctor likes Reuther. He marched with Martin Luther King. She'll get mad at you if you play the tape, though, I think it's fragile. The footage is all wobbly." Steph put the tape back down.

"This is totally _not_ how I imagined their house would look… I thought it would be, like, normal. But, I mean, that's an egg chair." It _was_ an egg chair, sitting next to the lobster tank, though it wasn't suspended from the ceiling. There were also mountains of books everywhere. The entire house was full to bursting with books. Every shelf had books on it, there were piles of them on the carpets, a stack on the coffee table, next to the lobster tank, stray books under the sofa, a book propping up the kitchen table, books on top of the microwave, half-obscuring most of the windows – there was not a single surface that didn't have a book on it. "Or, normal to an extent."

"What extent?"

"Well, I thought they'd have sex stuff everywhere. Like a swing, right in the living room."

"Uh… they don't even have a swing in their bedroom. Not that I've seen, anyway."

"What? You've been in their room?" Steph was enthralled by this information.

"I guess."

"What's it like?"

"Locked."

"Yeah, but, really. What's _in_ there?"

"Mess?" Mattie suggested, "They're kind of gross, I don't know, it's not very exciting." It was also full of sex toys and pornography, but she thought she oughtn't to mention that to Steph.

"Really? I never would've guessed that… it's clean in here. Apart from the books. Have they read all these?"

"I don't know. Clara's always reading something," Mattie shrugged. It was very rare to not see Clara with her head in a book. Steph picked up a nearby book to examine it, a book with an illegible title.

"This is in Russian," she said, and then she read the title out loud, though Matilda couldn't comprehend the words. " _Brat'ya Karamazovy_."

"I thought you're Polish?"

"I'm British. It's my parents who are Polish. But I can speak Russian."

" _You can speak Russian_?" Mattie asked, "So you speak, what? Three languages?"

Steph laughed and put the book down, "No, I speak four fluently, and some Hebrew. And I'm learning Hungarian."

"What's the fourth?"

"Yiddish. I like languages. Jake's useless, he doesn't know _any_ Yiddish. He forgets words in English sometimes…" Steph trailed off midsentence. "I really don't know what I'm gonna do if he's… I couldn't imagine him not being here… he's _always_ here… do you have any siblings?"

"No. Clara does, though, she has a sister."

"Is her sister hot?"

"I mean, they're twins."

" _What!?_ " Steph exclaimed, apparently forgetting about her missing brother, "You don't mean – they're not identical, though? Surely, they're not identical? There aren't _two_ people with that same face?" Matilda was so amused by this she very nearly told Steph there were a lot more than two people who shared Clara's face.

"They are identical, actually." Steph appeared to have gone into shock at this revelation. "Her sister's not gonna go out with you either, though." If there were ever two people in the universe who should never meet under any circumstances, they were Stefani Kaczmarek and Oswin Oswald.

"Do people get them mixed up? Has Dr Oswald ever, like, got off with the wrong one?"

"Quite hard to get them mixed up, since Oswin's in a wheelchair most of the time, and Clara's got, you know, the scar," Matilda said, "And no, before you ask, I don't know why she's in a wheelchair, and I don't know what happened to Clara's arm."

"Really? They won't tell you?"

"I don't think they're very happy stories they want to relive," said Matilda. It was true, she did not know the details of what had happened to Oswin's legs _or_ Clara's arm – she knew Esther was responsible for the injury but didn't know what had occurred to force Esther to act. Esther definitely wouldn't electrocute someone without a good reason. It had never seemed to affect their friendship, though.

"They should really have let the army deal with these trees," Steph changed the subject once her attention was brought back to the television and the overhead shots. "They're teachers, what're they gonna do? It's stupid… what if they don't come back? We're just left here?" In that case, Mattie would call Rose and she supposed Steph would find out about, well, everything, which was definitely a better outcome than being murdered by vampire trees.

"I think they'll be alright," she said. What else was she supposed to say? She _did_ think they'd be alright, but she couldn't tell Steph they'd be alright because one of them was a super-intelligent alien and the other a powerful Manifest. If worse came to worst, she was sure they had teleporters on them – though that might not do Jakub and the kidnapped animals much good.

"Why _do_ you live with them?"

"Because my parents died two months ago, and they named the Oswalds my legal guardians," Mattie explained as concisely as she could, not wanting to talk about her parents. Not to Steph.

"I thought you have a godmother?"

"Yeah, I do – she just travels a lot, doesn't really have a proper home."

"Is _she_ hot?"

"Uh…" Mattie glanced around the walls at the pictures, searching for one that had Rose in it. None of them seemed to, though; they were nearly all wedding photos and a big collage of polaroids from various times and places above the upright piano. "I couldn't say. There's no pictures of her here." Mattie thought she might have some in her own photos upstairs but really didn't want to go traipsing off to find a photo album just so that Steph could judge whether or not Rose Tyler was attractive. Unless it would take her mind off everything going on with the trees?

"Is something wrong with your eye?" Steph asked abruptly. Mattie immediately grew very self-conscious and looked away.

"It's just – it's lazy. I have a squint. And I'm short-sighted." The eye with the squint was actually much _more_ short-sighted than the other one, meaning one lens was almost twice as thick. This annoyingly made her glasses a little crooked most of the time. "When I was a toddler I had to wear an eyepatch."

"Matilda," Steph began mock-seriously, "That is the single most adorable thing I've ever heard."

"Thanks…"

"Speaking of adorable things, Hannah actually lives on this street. Garland Avenue. Can you believe that? All this time I've been sneaking into her bedroom and I had no idea the Hotswalds were just down the road. Everyone lives in Fiveways except me and Jake, it's bullshit. But that was always the problem with Hannah…"

"What?"

"That she lives in Fiveways. Her parents hate me, is the thing, and they're _super_ protective. They check on her when they go to bed, and stuff, it's totally weird." Mattie didn't think it was particularly weird for the Becketts to check on their daughter. "So I can never stay over, because of them looking in and then trying to chuck me out. But _now_ – I could just come here, instead of having to, like, worry about getting back to Hanover at one in the morning. Mrs Oswald would totally just drive me back." Matilda knew Clara almost definitely would just drive Steph home if this occurred, but couldn't say _she_ was thrilled with the idea of Steph using the house as a secret sex hideaway for every time she wanted to pollute Hannah.

"But you broke up with her, very publicly, and then she slapped you. Seems like her parents are right to hate you."

"Ouch. They just think I'm a bad influence."

"Are you?"

"Who knows? Jake agrees with them, and you – had a go at me for dumping her. And then so did Mrs Oswald. Basically everybody."

"It was messed up. She was crying." Steph quietened, thinking.

"Shall I go apologise? Walk down the road, sneak in now? Her bedroom is on the ground floor, in a converted garage. It's _so_ easy to sneak in, and Hannah will forgive me."

"You're sure about that?" Mattie asked incredulously.

"Oh, yeah. She's had a crush on me for years. I'm her white whale."

"You shouldn't take advantage of her. Like, you dumped her _in public_ , and then just assume she'll still want to see you?"

"She won't let me go that easily," said Steph, which wasn't much of a defence of her behaviour. She seemed uncomfortable talking about her dabblings with Hannah, probably because she knew it was morally wrong to just use her like that. Besides, Mattie would rather not get involved in Steph's personal life, it already looked bad enough from the outside. "Why a lobster?" Steph nodded at the tank. "Why not get, like, a dog?"

"Clara doesn't like pets," Mattie said, "She doesn't even really like Captain Nemo. The Doctor stole him from a restaurant because he's blue." Captain Nemo stood in the middle of his tank minding his own business. He had absolutely no idea that the city was being invaded by monsters from another planet.

"Kind of boring, though. I mean, what does he do? Just stand there?"

"Basically. Sometimes he walks from one side of the tank to the other. The Doctor really wants a dog, but Clara won't let her."

"I can't believe you're just _allowed_ to call her 'Clara.'"

"It's her name."

"But you don't call the Doctor by _her_ name? Whatever it is – I don't even know."

"Everybody calls her 'the Doctor,'" said Mattie, "That's just how it is. One of those nicknames that stick, I guess."

"What _is_ her name?"

"It's, um…" Mattie strained to think, trying to remember the Doctor's human alias she was using, since obviously she couldn't apply for a job and say her name is 'the Doctor' (she could try, but Mattie was sure Clara was more sensible than that.) "It's… Dora, I think. It's short for Theodora, Theodora Oswald, I guess." She thought it was an uncommon name, but she didn't know the story behind it. "I wouldn't call her that, though, she never answers to it."

"So, you're telling me that Mrs Oswald never calls her wife by her actual name?" Mattie had to stop herself from making a joke about how the Doctor was just as guilty, more likely to call Clara 'Coo' than anything else, but did not think they would forgive her if she let slip to Steph what the Doctor's private pet-name for Clara was. "They are _super_ weird." _You have no idea_ , Matilda thought to herself.

She decided she was tired of looking at trees on TV, so found the remote and switched to a different channel, searching for other news items. Of course, the other major thing being reported on was the earthquake in San Francisco, which had happened some seven hours ago. The coverage for this was also reels of overhead shots, but these ones were vastly more interesting because they were primarily action-replays of Lightning Girl sightings. Blurs of blue and white light in the city streets, leading the rescuers to people trapped in buildings very quickly.

"You know what we should do?" Steph asked, looking at the screen. She was still sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of it. "We should, like, tweet the Lightning Girl. This tree thing is way more urgent than some earthquake. Like, they should really have been expecting an earthquake if they all insist on living in California, right? At least they're not being kidnapped off the streets." That idea was not actually half-bad – surely it couldn't hurt to get Esther involved?

"I don't know," Mattie said unsurely, though she was taking out her phone, "Who says she'll even respond? Have you ever tweeted her before?" She had a string of messages from Aki still panicking about Hiro the missing dog, including sending Matilda some _very_ cute pictures just in case she saw him on the street, but was forced to ignore them in favour of finding her message thread with Esther. Her conversations with Esther were rare and usually limited to talking about horror films.

With Steph paying attention to the television, she managed to send a text without being noticed: _Crazy carnivorous trees killing people in Brighton. Clara & the Doctor might need help._ She was debating asking Rose for help, too, just to make sure they were doubly safe, but Steph interrupted.

"This is depressing. The news, I mean. Don't you have anything else to watch? Apart from antique videos? This is just making me worry about Jake."

"I've got a lot of horror films upstairs?" Mattie suggested.

"Horror films? That's what you're into?"

"I guess. Gory ones are the best."

"I would never have guessed that about you."

"Well, I make special effects stuff, when I'm bored," she said. Steph stared at her. "What?"

"You mean, like, wounds and stuff?"

"Yeah. Peeling skin, fake blood, gangrene – anything gross."

"Is that what you want to do when you're older? Make special effects?"

"God, no, it's just for fun. I want to be a surgeon."

"That deeply concerns me. Somebody obsessed with gore becoming a healthcare professional."

"I'm not _obsessed_ – I just – I think it'd be fun to cut people open."

"If I need surgery in ten years' time, I'm staying well away from you."

"Do you want to watch a movie, though? I've got a projector and a screen up on the wall in my room."

"An invitation to your room? Are you _sure_ you're not into me? I can't pretend it wouldn't be even more convenient if my drop-bys at Hannah's could be changed for one-stop-shops at the Hotswalds'." Mattie grimaced. "I'm kidding, wow. Just trying to, I don't know, forget about how Jake's…"

"I really do think they'll all be okay," she said, though she wasn't able to shake the nagging feeling that she might be unwittingly lying. Her phone buzzed.

"Who's that?"

"Aki," Mattie said, and this time she was _wittingly_ lying because it was actually Esther.

 _I'll check it out ASAP_ , read the message. She felt better knowing the Lightning Girl _was_ going to do her due diligence and help them.

"She's just worried about her dog."

"…I guess horror movies could be kind of distracting."

"Yeah. They'll pass the time, until-"

"Until these fucking trees try to kill us, too. We're on borrowed time. How sturdy do you think those windows are?" she asked. Mattie knew the windows were made of a type of glass from the future they used to make space station viewing platforms, densi or something, so they could probably keep out a few trees.

"Come on, then," Mattie said, getting up, turning the TV off. It would be good to get away from the news coverage. Steph stood up to follow her. The stairs themselves also had books stacked on them, as well as pairs of shoes. It was always tricky not to trip. "Careful on all this crap," she warned. On the upstairs landing windowsill, a few plants were kept with odd, blue leaves – Mattie had forgotten about those.

"What are _those_?" Steph stared at them. Mattie only knew they were alien.

"They're fake," she said quickly, "Just for show. Add some colour." Steph believed this, thankfully, and her attention changed towards the four doors on the first floor. "My room's in the attic…" Mattie said, but Steph had a different goal in mind: trying to break into Clara and the Doctor's bedroom. She tried the door closest to the window first. "That's the library." It was also locked.

"You've got a library?"

"Well, it's really just a room with books in it, it's nothing fancy." More lies, it was _very_ fancy, transdimensional, possessing objects the likes of which Steph could hardly imagine. "The next door is their bedroom, but it's gonna be locked too, so there's no point-" Steph completely ignored her and tried the door anyway, but as predicted, it was locked.

"What're the other rooms?" Steph asked, "None of them yours?"

"No, that's the bathroom," she pointed at the door directly at the top of the stairs, "And that's the guest bedroom. It's tiny, though, it's literally just got a bed in it, and even that barely fits. More of a cupboard."

"That's where I'll be sleeping, then. You know, when I go to Hannah's and then come here to hide from the wrath of her parents. On the same floor as the Hotswalds, too, maybe I'll be able to hear them doing it."

"I doubt that," said Matilda, leading her upstairs.

"Why?"

"Well, I've never heard them."

"Do they not do it?"

"No, I _know_ from their conversations that they do it _constantly_. But, like, super quietly, I guess. Unless they have soundproofing? Maybe they do. But I do think they're also really quiet."

"That's crazy. How can anyone stay quiet?"

"Practice…? I'd really rather not think about it, to be honest with you."

"I find it hard _not_ to think about it."

"You could be more respectful," said Mattie, opening the door to her bedroom, "I mean, they're out there risking their lives right now looking for your brother, you don't have to be so creepy."

" _Ouch_. Did things just get real, or what?" Steph said, stepping inside as Mattie held the door open. "Side note – holy _shit_ , this room is _huge_. This is legitimately the entire attic."

"It's a conversion. They were like, 'we think you need your own space.' I'm not gonna argue with them," she shrugged. It _was_ a large room. "It's bigger than their bedroom."

"That's crazy. They should've switched rooms, taken the attic."

"The rest of the _entire house_ is theirs, to be fair," she closed the door. She hadn't tidied, though her room was notably cleaner than Clara's. The desk underneath the skylight was covered in clutter, paper and homework, and she hadn't made the bed. There was a bean bag thrown into a corner, and elsewhere was a large collection of her SFX stuff. All the things she used to make wounds when she got bored. She was currently working on a way to make it look like her jaw had been ripped off, but it required better artistry than she was capable of – maybe Aki would help. "What do you want to watch?"

"I don't know. Anything. Your room is cool, by the way. Mine's probably more like the 'cupboard' downstairs. Jake's is a bit bigger. They made us share until we were, like, eleven, then moved me into the smaller one," she said.

"Well, I've got this rare director's cut of the original _Dawn of the Dead_ I was planning on watching at some point, so, I guess if you like zombies?" she suggested. It was actually Esther's rare copy of _Dawn of the Dead_ she had leant Matilda. "It's, like, the ultimate zombie flick. Literally defined the entire zombie genre."

"Sure. As long as it doesn't have any trees in it. If you suggested _Blair Witch_ , I'd probably kill myself."

"Yeah, that is a tree-heavy film," she said, thinking. "The Oswalds love _Blair Witch_ , they watch it every Halloween."

"They must have shit taste in films then because it's boring as fuck." Mattie went to switch on her projector, feeling that the entire situation – namely her having a sort-of friend over to hang out with – was hopelessly surreal, the kind of thing she only thought happened in high school films. "Go on, then. Hit me with these zombies. And it better be saturated with gore. It wouldn't be a proper trip to the Hotswalds without my poor, teenage brain being addled by gratuitously violent media. It's this or I go find some porn, I'm sure they've got porn somewhere." She sat down on the floor in front of the bed.

"Well, it's from 1978, it's not exactly _Saw_ ," said Mattie, "Although I thought _Saw XXV_ was a let-down. They've just run out of interesting ways to torture people."

"Oh, sure. I'm sure it's still fine. Bring it on."

* * *

"You know, you didn't have to lie and pretend you're not squeamish," said Mattie. Stefani's pallor had changed dramatically throughout their viewing of _Dawn of the Dead_ , which really wasn't even that gory, Mattie didn't think. Like she'd said, the thing _was_ from 1978. "Could've shown you, like _Cannibal Holocaust_. Or _Antichrist_. Or _Irreversible_ – there's this whole scene where they beat a guy to death with a fire extinguish and the camera never cuts, it's _so_ cool, like, for the special effects. _Martyrs_ is kind of horrific."

"I'm officially regretting trying to befriend you."

"Are you sure? You don't want to watch _Antichrist_?"

"What happens in it that's so bad…?"

"She tries to cut off her, like, labia, with nail scissors." Steph stared at her. "What?"

"Who lets you watch these?"

"I used to watch them with my dad," she said. It was many years ago that her parents had finally started losing in arguments with her about what films she should be allowed to watch. Maybe she was still a teenager, but she had been a teenager for a very long time and there was no way she was waiting until she was sixty to watch Romero. "Mum watched them sometimes, but she doesn't like gore fests."

"Is she squeamish, too? Not that I'm squeamish."

"My mum?" Mattie nearly laughed. "No, she was an ER doctor, she could never help pointing out all the inaccuracies and how unrealistic they are."

"Your parents sound cool."

"Yeah… yeah, they were… they-"

A crash downstairs interrupted them right as the credits for _Dawn of the Dead_ began to roll. Mattie's stomach sank, and she began to feel just as sick as Stefani looked, worried that the trees had actually managed to break into the house. But then she heard shouting, shouting she recognised distinctly. Steph took off first to go after news of her brother, Mattie following in her wake. It sounded like a _lot_ of arguing was going on, though.

When they reached the stairs down to the ground floor, they saw the chaos in the hall; two cats and a dog unleashed into the house, undoubtedly Aki's husky and Sarah Pickman's tabbies, while Clara was half-carrying an unconscious Jakub into the living room.

"Jake!" Steph exclaimed, jumping the bottom few steps to go accost Clara and check on his wellbeing. She didn't even notice the Lightning Girl standing next to the Doctor in the doorway, who was trying to wrangle the animals while Clara complained about having them in the house. Like Mattie had been saying, Clara wasn't a big fan of animals. Steph started saying unintelligible things in Polish to try and rouse Jake.

"What happened?" Mattie asked the Doctor and Esther quietly, lowering her voice. Steph was too focused on Jake to pay them any mind for the time being. "Also, your costume is, like, way cooler in person."

"Thanks," said Esther, "But, uh, secret identity."

"Yeah, I know."

"What happened is _somebody_ had a brain aneurysm telekinetically ripping root-arteries out of a giant tree-heart-thing," explained the Doctor, "Sparky showed up at the last possible moment."

"Hey, I saved you from being crushed to death by a falling rock."

"I _said_ she was _phasing_."

"She was unconscious," said Esther, her voice sounding robotic as it was filtered through the mask. "Good thing you texted me since these two are obviously too proud."

"We were handling it," said the Doctor, shaking her head, "Long story short, everything's fine now. The new leader of UNIT might be a weirdo with an alien parasite attached to her arm harbouring a _very_ stalker-ish crush on me, but they've got their soldiers doing the legwork freeing all the people down there. They should all survive, provided they get blood transfusions pretty soon."

"Oh. Will they be able to?"

"They clone blood cells for medical purposes now," Esther said, "Sally's always talking about it, but she says the cloned blood doesn't taste as good."

"Gross."

"Yeah. Well, uh, I should probably-"

"You're the Lightning Girl!" Steph appeared in the living room doorway. So she _had_ noticed Esther.

"Saved all our lives," said the Doctor, "Gotta love that Lightning Girl, taking time out of her busy earthquake schedule to rescue a couple of nobodies like us."

"I always have time for nobodies like you," said Esther, "Besides, it's California, they should know there's an earthquake risk when they move there."

"That's what I said!" Steph exclaimed.

"Are you alright?" Clara interjected, leaving the living room. She was talking to Steph. "You look a bit grey, are you ill?"

"No."

"She's squeamish," Mattie said, "We were watching _Dawn of the Dead_."

"A classic! Basically the foundation for every subsequent piece of zombie media," said Esther, "Shopping malls, cabin fever, biting people to spread contagion – all Romero's brainchild. Get it? _Brain_ -child?"

"Hilarious," said the Doctor dryly.

"C'mon, that was great," Esther was the only person amused by her own joke, but she had never been very good at telling jokes, "Do you know it's only a critique of consumerism by complete coincidence? And then _Night of the Living Dead_ has that whole accidental race angle. He just makes all these uber symbolic media, like, by complete chance."

"A bit like how it must be complete chance that a total nerd decides to become a superhero," said the Doctor. They were definitely acting chummy enough for it to be suspicious to Steph, or it would be, were she not so preoccupied with the euphoria of Jakub not being dead.

"… _Anyway_ …" Esther began, "I should be going. I could help clear some of these trees, probably." The trees weren't gone, not by a longshot, but already looked noticeably dead.

"Wait, actually," Mattie said, "I have a friend who thinks you – the Lightning Girl – are, like, the coolest person in the world, and that's her missing dog. It'd mean the world if you were the one who took the dog back to her."

"Oh. Sure thing!" said Esther brightly, "I like dogs. What's his name?"

"Hiro."

" _Hiro_? That's awesome."

"Are you taking these animals away? I'll drive you," Clara offered.

"She's the Lightning Girl, she doesn't need to be driven anywhere," said Steph.

"Actually, while _I_ can turn into electricity and travel through cabling and the air, I'm not able to turn any other living things into electricity. So a drive would be a big help."

"Anything for our trusty, neighbourhood safety hazard," said Clara. Was she okay to drive? If she'd just had an aneurysm? Mattie could still see blood around her nose that hadn't been fully cleaned off. "You stay here and watch these teenagers," she told the Doctor.

"Sure, sure…" she said, picking up one of the cats from where it had lain down on the steps, "Are you Louis or Marie? Which one of you are we going to behead first?"

"Sweetheart, don't tell the cats you're going to behead them," said Clara, shaking her head, picking up the other one. The two of them left while the Doctor continued to express her distaste over the names of Sarah Pickman's cats to put them in the van. Esther whistled to get Hiro to leave the kitchen and follow her. He bounded after her, seemingly no worse for wear after being kidnapped.

"Is Jake okay?" Mattie asked Steph while the adults fussed around with the Volkswagen in the drive.

"How are they planning on driving that through the streets with all the trees?" Presumably by turning it intangible and just driving straight through them.

"Pfft," Mattie shrugged, "Haven't a clue. She did say she might be able to clear the roads, so."

"Huh… Mrs Oswald says he's asleep."

"That's good."

"How did you know they'd all be alright?"

"I didn't, I just trust them," she said. The Doctor returned promptly, leaving Esther and Clara in charge of taking the animals back to their rightful owners.

"Can I get you girls anything to eat, then?" she asked, "There's a whole lot of bacon left."

"Jake and I don't eat bacon," said Steph.

"Do you eat cheese? I could do toasties on the grill."

"I'm not hungry…" said Steph, "Those zombies really do know how to rip out a person's most vital organs…"

"Fair enough. Romero can be a ride for the unenlightened. I'll get you some water. How about you, Matts?"

"I wouldn't say _no_ to a cheese toastie."

"If you try to put Nutella on it, I'm kicking you out," she said, heading off towards the kitchen.

"But Nutella and cheese go great together."

"You put _Nutella_ on a cheese toastie?" Steph asked, disgusted.

"It's not that bad," Mattie followed the Doctor, "At least I'm not the kind of freak who'd wash out an empty yoghurt tub and then fill it with mayonnaise, then eat the mayonnaise with a spoon while tricking people into thinking it's actually yoghurt."

"What the _fuck_?" Steph asked.

"I'd just like to make it clear that I don't support my wife in any capacity when she does that," said the Doctor, fetching cheese from the fridge and taking out the sandwich toaster, "Which is saying something, because I've just had to prove that I'm super supportive of her. The thing with the mayonnaise and the yoghurts is weird. Are you sure you don't want anything, Steph? A drink? A snack?"

"I'll just… get a glass of water…"

"Oh, I'll do it, just sit down. It's been a long day. First the thing with the trees, then Matilda subjects you to her horror films. She didn't start talking about _Antichrist_ again, did she?" The Doctor went to wash her hands and then get Steph some water.

"Hey!" Mattie argued, "It's a good film."

"It's actually not, at all. Lucky we got back before you made her watch _Irreversible_. There's only so many times you can watch a guy beaten to death with a fire extinguisher."

"That scene is flawless," said Mattie.

"Yeah, apart from its subject matter. Not to mention the ten-minute rape scene after that. You have absolutely no taste. I mean, your father – god rest his soul – he did not instil in you the values necessary to judge whether a movie is good or not. He liked _Mars Attacks_ way too much."

" _Mars Attacks_ is great," said Mattie, "It's not like media has to condone the things it portrays."

"This is what I mean," she said, slicing the cheese, "What's your favourite movie, Steph?"

" _The Graduate_." Both Matilda and the Doctor groaned in response, though Mattie had a feeling Steph was kidding.

"I should've guessed," the Doctor muttered, "You're worse than her dad. And he once tried to get me to marathon every episode of _The Wire_."

"Did he?"

"It was a long time ago. You should ask Rose about it. She always used to say, 'Don't get Mickey started on _The Wire_.'" Matilda _had_ seen every episode of _The Wire_ with her father, who had always been quite enthusiastic about it. Perhaps she should watch it again. "Still. It sure beats being made to watch _Don't Tell the Bride_ on a loop every weekend. I guess that's women for you."

"Don't you make her watch _SpongeBob_ , though?" Mattie asked, knowing that the Doctor was complaining indirectly about Clara's television habits.

" _SpongeBob_ has depth. And she's already married, there's no reason for her to be so interested in weddings. How much cheese do you want?"

"More than that. Please," said Mattie.

"So, you two were okay here on your own today? You didn't, uh… go snooping?"

"Your bedroom door was locked," said Mattie.

"Oi!" Steph protested, "I did not try to get into the bedroom. I wouldn't do that."

"A good thing it was locked. I'm gonna have to convince her to help me clean it…" She put the bread into the grill and set it off cooking. "Jakub should wake up soon. The trees were anaesthetising people and then drinking their blood. From what I can gather with my very limited expertise, as a history teacher." She was not very convincing. "That's what the soldiers said."

"Are the trees… like, _alien_ trees?"

"Probably," said the Doctor. The existence of aliens was no longer a secret to Earth's population, not after so many attempted invasions, but there still weren't any species they had open lines of communication with. Aliens were known about but misunderstood and feared, which was why the Doctor had to pretend she wasn't one. "An invasive species come to push the humans out. I mean, _us_ humans. Like when they introduced the American grey squirrels to Britain and killed all the red squirrels. Or when American crayfish were released into lakes in Africa and killed all the native fish. Or when American settlers went across to New England and tried to wipe out all the First Nations people."

"Aren't _you_ American?" Steph pointed out.

"Eurgh. Don't remind me."

"Surely the settlers were technically English, though," Mattie said.

"Maybe I'm generalising too much, instead of 'Americans' I ought to be saying western imperialists with a knack for committing genocide. If history teaches us anything, it's that you should _not_ trust Europeans."

"Or white people," said Mattie.

"Well, exactly," agreed the Doctor.

"I'm gonna go check on Jake," said Steph after a pause. Neither of them stopped her from leaving the room. Once she was gone and relatively out of earshot, the Doctor finished making Mattie her toastie and brought it over.

"What was in the tube, then?" Mattie whispered, "Really?"

"Tube's completely overrun," she explained, also as quietly as possible, sitting in the chair at the kitchen table next to Matilda, "They were keeping the people wired into the walls of these tunnels and sucking their blood _very_ slowly. But I was right, there was a central locus, a giant ball of blood, _huge_ – Clara destroyed it, then Esther showed up, then UNIT."

"You said the leader of UNIT is stalking you?"

"Oh. My. God. She was dressed like me. Not me-me, but other, past versions of me – _totally_ freaky. Like looking in a funhouse mirror. And they've got her in charge of the planet's primo alien-intelligence organisation, when she literally has a Scek – which is an alien parasite sort of like a Symbiote – latched onto her arm. The damn thing is keeping her young while probably having untold effects on her mind. Honestly, I dread to think where that's all gonna lead. Nowhere good. Letting a Scek attach itself to you is like making a deal with the devil. _Anything_ can happen."

"Can I really not put any Nutella on this?"

"You're unbelievable. Nutella and cheddar – that's even too gross for me."

"I heard you used to eat fish fingers and custard."

"It was a dark time." They heard voices in the next room; Jake had woken up. Both of them proceeded to investigate and found Steph hugging him as he groggily tried to work out where he was. He muttered something in Polish.

"It's the Oswalds' house," Steph explained, "They went and got you."

"Got me from where…?"

"The tube tunnels," said the Doctor, "You were kidnapped by some alien trees. Or so I'm told. But you're okay now, you'll just need to rest up. You've suffered minor blood loss. I heard. Mrs Oswald will take you home once she gets back. Do you want anything to eat, drink? Although, I'm honestly not sure how much of our food is kosher."

"You don't have to, um…" Jake was very confused by the situation.

"Are you sure?" Jake squinted at her. "You know what – don't worry about it. But shout if you need anything." Steph said something else to Jake in Polish but was interrupted by the Doctor, who was suddenly offended. "There is _nothing_ weird about my videos, Stefani." Steph was shocked.

"Do you speak Polish?"

"Enough," she said, "What's your beef with my VHS tapes?"

"Why do you have them?"

"For the aesthetic. The grain, the bad audio, the fuzzy images, it all contributes to that elusive, 1980s zeitgeist."

"So what _are_ the videos?" Steph persisted, "Who's Walter Reuther?"

"A prominent unionist erased from history by bourgeois academics," said the Doctor, "He marched with Martin Luther King, at Selma."

"I said that," said Mattie.

"So you really _do_ listen to me. He created the United Automobile Workers union to really stick it to Henry Ford. A leftist who survived two assassinations and supported civil rights in the golden era of social progress – the Sixties. The video is a recording of an episode of _Batfink_ from 1967 – do you guys know _Batfink_?" They shook their heads. "Well, it's a kids' cartoon about a bat superhero, very offensive because of its use of racist, East Asian stereotypes – we have a friend who used to have a cat named after Batfink, though – anyway, this episode is alleged to contain a hidden, anti-Reuther political message, saying Reuther and the organised labour movement is the biggest threat to America. Only, I haven't been able to find any evidence of the message from watching the video."

"What are the other videos?" Steph asked, not particularly interested in subliminal messages from a hundred years ago about people she'd never heard of. The Doctor walked over to her stack of videos to examine them.

"There's _Batfink_ , this one is the Kennedy assassination, uh… _Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island_ , an underrated classic easily able to match Romero… _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ , also a classic, and something labelled 'wedding video' I don't recall the details of. Could be anybody's wedding video. Clara probably knows." She put the videos back down on top of the ancient VCR. "Somewhere I have a _very_ rare recording of _The Scooby-Doo Project_."

"The what?" Mattie asked.

"Have I never told you about that? It's great. It was aired on Halloween, 1999, as a special made to capitalise on the success of _The Blair Witch Project_ – they call it the first movie to ever go viral and say what you like about it, but the marketing campaign was genius. So they did this crossover on Cartoon Network where the Scooby-Doo gang go to the woods looking for the Blair Witch, and they aired it in chunks during commercial breaks during a big _Scooby-Doo_ Halloween marathon. But the best part is that it was so traumatic for the kids watching that it was _never_ re-aired, never released on video, or DVD. Only way to see it is if someone happened to record it when it was on, and then spliced together the footage to see the complete package," she explained. Mattie could hardly believe that was a real thing, but also that she didn't already know about it. "You can find it online now, but I love the authenticity of a bootleg videotape. That's why _The Ring_ is so powerful." Mattie's phone buzzed just when Jakub asked the Doctor to explain why, exactly, she had a tape of the Kennedy assassination in the living room.

She received about a dozen messages in a row from Aki, some with Japanese characters mixed in, all expressing a hereby unseen level of joy at meeting the Lightning Girl in the flesh, _and_ getting her missing dog returned. Esther even had the courtesy to stop for a selfie. She showed the Doctor.

"It was good of you to tell her to take the dog back personally," said the Doctor, "I'm sure it means the world to Akiko." Mattie smiled to herself and typed a response, while the Doctor clapped her hands. "Okay, I won't have the two of you in my house shirking my famous hospitality – I'm making hot chocolate with extra whipped cream for everybody, and I won't take no for an answer. It's been a long week and the sugar is well-earned. We also have some cake that needs eating, so you're all getting some, no arguments." She went back into the kitchen.

"So you really _do_ live with them?" Jakub asked Matilda.

"Yeah," she said, smiling a little sadly, "I really do…"


	21. Double Blind - Chapter 1

_Double Blind_

 _1_

There was a layer of condensation across the window exterior, dappling it with old rain-marks and dirty streaks. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the length of that side of the corridor, a long, stretching passage filled with large signposts written in a dozen different languages. All the terms were engineering terms; 'water storage,' 'suction controls,' 'navigation room,' 'floatation centre.' None of the signs offered an indication of what the flying vessel they were on actually _was_ , though, or why it seemed to be empty. It hummed faintly, hovered miles above a distant and an uncanny landmark – though its shape wasn't quite what she would expect from maps and Google Earth.

" _Wow_ … we're so high up," Yasmin Khan said, leaning close to the window, which ended so abruptly she felt in danger of falling through it, all the way down to the scorched-orange continent below. It reminded her of the slow pace of the London Eye, the only time she'd been on it during a family holiday south a long time ago now. Or maybe it was like being in a hot air balloon, though she'd never been in one of those, either. Vastly different to an aeroplane though; about as high but moving so slowly it was like they were stopped in space, suspended. Ryan and Graham were also struck by the view, the blue-bordered landscape beneath.

"You see that?" the Doctor pointed over Yaz's shoulder at the island, "Australia. That little corner? There?"

"Where?"

"Just _there_ ," the Doctor nudged her head slightly until she spotted an ant-sized city on the distant coastline, "Sydney. We're not as high as we look, only five miles, lower than a jumbo jet flies. Above the rainclouds."

"On what? A plane?" Ryan asked.

"Not sure. Weird how it's empty, whatever it is," the Doctor mused, "Then again, if my watch is right-" Not that she was wearing a watch, "-we're somewhere in the 2060s. It's probably just automated. Like a self-checkout machine, but… bigger. I suppose that makes us unexpected items in the bagging area." Nobody laughed, still preoccupied with the view. "Nothing? Really? You lot just do not appreciate me."

"It doesn't look like Sydney," said Graham, "The outback's stretching out for miles, right to the coast."

"Climate change," she said, "Killing the planet, bit by bit. But from an engineering perspective, this structure is very interesting, reminds me of the _Valiant_. You remember the _Valiant_ , don't you? Or maybe not. How old were you two again? In 2007?"

"Nine," said Yaz and Ryan.

"Forty-seven," said Graham, "The _Valiant_ 's that aircraft carrier owned by MI6, isn't it?"

"UNIT, before they went defunct," said the Doctor, "Not MI6. Not subtle enough for MI6. MI5, maybe, they're a lot less discreet. The _Valiant_ was built by a friend of mine. Well, I say friend, more like… enemy. Frenemy. Best frenemy. Not that this is the _Valiant_ , what would they need something like this for? And over Australia? Why would they need 'suction controls'? What's a 'floatation centre'? How do you think we're flying? I don't hear any engines, isn't that weird?" She turned to wander off in another direction, following the signs. Yaz, Ryan and Graham followed, lest they be left behind and lost. Then again, there were so many signs it was probably quite hard to get lost. "The thing is, you humans are so obsessed with the military industrial complex that it seems impossible for something like this to come into being _without_ it having a military purpose… but then, they've never really had militarised airships. Very easy to shoot down, see, and flammable. Do you know I was on the _Hindenburg_?"

"Next thing you'll say you were on the _Titanic_ ," Graham joked.

"I was. Very cold. Didn't even find Leo in the end – _disappointing_. Ah-ha! Suction Room C! Let's have a look at the suction room. I wonder what's _in_ a suction room…"

She pushed open the doors to the very clearly signposted Suction Room C, a swing door that didn't have any locks on it, digital or otherwise. It was vast, big as an aircraft hanger, and full of tubes. Colour-coded, labelled, easy to identify, all leading from the 'tubes' to the 'pumps' to the 'dispersal centre.' The tubes were probably big enough to walk in, and all coiled up until the room was full of them. They were on a large balcony overlooking it all with a complex set of controls. Panels with screens and readouts and buttons on them, which the Doctor found very exciting.

"Deploy tubes… what will deploying the tubes do, I wonder…"

"Should you really mess around with this thing?" Ryan said, "We don't even know what it does, what it's for."

"Messing around with things is all we ever do," said the Doctor, "Ah! Would you look at that, it's got an entire system diagnostics tool, didn't even have to sonic it. Which, retrospectively, is very disappointing, because I do love to sonic things. And the diagnostics screen says that this machine is called the… 'Rain-O-Matic.'"

"It's what?" Yaz asked.

"That's ridiculous, sounds like something out of _Wallace & Gromit_," said Graham.

"It does sound like that!" the Doctor exclaimed, "How weird. Maybe a nerd built it. Its patented name is the Mobile Precipitation Retrieval and Dispersal Device. MPRDD. 'Rain-O-Matic' is definitely catchier."

"This is a rain machine?" Ryan asked, "It makes rain?"

"Sort of, it sucks up seawater, filters it in the same way clouds do and then flies over countries and rains on them. To combat climate change and droughts… how ingenious! And completely non-military. I was right, it is automatic, that's why it's unmanned. But the thing is, I've never seen one of these before. It's definitely something I'd remember, and I've been to the 2060s before. When I went, everyone was just hot, and there were lots more wildfires. In Kent. Have you ever seen a Kentish wildfire?"

"There are definitely worse places you could have a wildfire," said Ryan.

"Harsh, but fair point… hang on… how can… have any of you ever heard of CyTech?"

"No," they all said.

"Are you sure? Founded in late 2012, quickly became the biggest supplier of security software on Earth? According to the company information page on this computer. I love the effort to make everything so much more accessible these days. The signs? Nice touch. But CyTech? Drawing a blank?"

"Yeah, why?" Yaz asked.

"That's strange… mostly because I haven't heard of them, either."

"I've just got that McAfee," said Yaz.

"Yeah, same," said Ryan, "Can't work out how to uninstall it."

"Why would a software security company build a big rain machine?" Graham wondered, "Isn't like corporations to be moral and help with climate change."

"No, you're right," said the Doctor, "Does seem out of character. Not much more information here, unfortunately. I'd love to Google it, but I don't think these computers connect to anything external, they're a bit weird. They're connected to a network, but not the internet, and not local – probably the company has its own way to control these machines remotely, it's the only reason they can get away with being unmanned."

"Is it safe to have nobody on them like this?" Graham asked.

"Well, most passenger planes in 2019 basically fly themselves. Fifty years later, yeah, it's probably fine," she shrugged, "Probably next to impossible that something would ever go wrong, too, the machinery isn't _that_ complicated, just big. In fact, I'd even bet that a thing like this is safer than-" The rain machine jerked and they all wobbled, the lights above flickering, then dying.

"Safer than…?" Ryan prompted.

"Cars, I was going to say," the Doctor said quietly. The lights stayed off.

"Maybe… a fuse blew? Could be a leak, all the water."

"Yeah… or…" it wobbled again, more violently, and they grabbed the railings at the edge of the balcony. "I'm sure there's a backup power supply somewhere, auxiliary generators, it'll kick in right about…" The Doctor paused to wait, Yaz hoping beyond hope that she was right about backup generators. Everywhere had backup power, though, so surely things were even safer in the future? And yet, nothing happened. They stayed in darkness, and then began to descend. It was gentle at first, like going down in a lift, but Yaz knew what that meant: their suspension had gone. They were falling. "Typical!" the Doctor exclaimed as the thing began to tilt sideways, throwing them all towards the back wall. She began feeling her way out of the room towards the doors, the other three still following, panicking and desperate. "You know, I think by this point the really exciting thing would be us _not_ in the middle of a disaster. But it's par for the course, really – big airship hovering pendulously over a densely-populated, major city? Us on board?" She looked over her shoulder, "Well _come on_ , we have to save Sydney! What are you doing all the way back there!?"

"It's hard to walk and fall at the same time!" Yaz protested.

"How are we supposed to save them? Where are we going?" Ryan asked.

"Generator Room, see?" the Doctor pointed, "It's right there on the sign. I love these signs. Give my thanks to whoever it was who invented signs. Very odd how we could lose complete power, though, surely there's a billion security features? The software must be impeccable to be the biggest security company on the planet, right? Well, maybe not impeccable for me, but for a human to crack – you'd need a supercomputer. Why would a supercomputer want to break a rain machine?" The Doctor kept talking to herself, but luckily the generator room wasn't very far from Suction Room C.

"Just stop speculating and start _doing_!" Graham implored.

"Right! Yes! Good idea! Fix the problem! Where _is_ the problem?" Probably nowhere easy to pinpoint, going by the size of the generator room. Four generators, three of which were marked by big 'auxiliary' signs. So there were three backup generators, and none of them was working? " _There's_ the problem!" the Doctor declared, pointing at something. She ran down the steps towards the generators themselves, nearly falling over the railing as their collapse continued. "Quicker! Come on! We've got less than a minute to get these online before we crash and die! Do you know how fast something like this will reach its terminal velocity?"

What the Doctor had discovered was a big mechanical disc with a blinking light on it, some kind of device stuck right over the health and safety warnings.

"Whatever lunatic built this thing with its accessible systems and many-languaged signs would never obscure a health and safety warning," the Doctor explained, "Meaning this thing _isn't_ meant to be here." Yaz could feel the weight lifting from her feet as they continued to fall and fall and fall. How long until she started floating? Until it felt like zero gravity? Would that only happen right when they were about to collide head-on with the Sydney Opera House?

The device was only slightly bigger than a DVD, but the Doctor was jubilant when she pulled out her screwdriver and scanned it. "Ha-ha! This _is_ the problem! It's an EMP device, magnetic, stuck on here – one on all the generators, need to remove them. They've been placed here and remotely activated, the perpetrator could be anywhere-"

"Perpetrator!? This is sabotage?" Yaz asked.

"Definitely, for someone who hates rain, probably. Wants to burn Kent to the ground." She sonicked the disc until she could pull it off with her hands, throwing it to the floor behind her where it rolled away, slightly dented.

"Okay, now what?" Ryan asked.

"Well, we… uh-oh."

"What? Doctor, we need to stop this thing from crashing," Graham said.

"Yes, I know, it's just very tricky," she said. Only _now_ was the Doctor's panic evident, "We need a jolt, a boost, a spark, to get the generator going, kick-start it. The TARDIS could do it – but I'm not sure I could get to the TARDIS in – and couldn't run the cables this far – maybe reverse the EMP device? Wouldn't have enough power to… it's a time machine, maybe just-"

A vivid, blue flash tore through the air, a bolt of lightning striking into the dark interior like energy bleeding from the wiring and the fixtures. In an instant, the blast had formed itself into a humanoid shape, a figure with blue sparks flying from an elaborate costume they were wearing. Yaz had seen people teleport before, but none so dramatic. The very air around them felt imbued with electricity. The figure didn't slow down, though. They moved so quickly they became nothing more than a blur, lightning streaking through the air and whizzing between all four of the large generators. If Yaz didn't know better, she would say the person was turning into living electricity as they dashed around faster than Yaz could keep track. They were muttering to themselves though, stray words about 'devices' and 'sabotage' and a slew of numbers that sounded like an on-the-fly calculation of the aircraft's terminal velocity and impact trajectory.

"Looking for this?" the Doctor asked loudly, taking change and picking the disc EMP up from the floor. The figure shot up in front of them and their mask lit up brightly when they saw the object in the Doctor's hands.

"Yes! Thank you, oh my gosh, here I was thinking we were all gonna die." Yaz was wholly taken aback by this stranger speaking to them in a bright, American accent, and being a girl. Then again, they were very short when they stood still for a few seconds. Electric currents danced across her fancy suit when she paused. "Okay, you need to help me; get that thing as far away from me as possible and get rid of the others."

"Others?" the Doctor asked.

"It's an EMP charge remotely activated to short-circuit the main and auxiliary generators," she explained, talking even faster than the Doctor on a good day, "There should be one on each generator. It contains a secondary explosive device designed to go off when an electrical current passes through it, which means _I_ can't touch it because I passively emit, like, fifty-thousand joules of electricity."

"What do you mean when you say you 'passively emit fifty-thousand joules of electricity'?"

"I actively emit a couple billion," she said, making the Doctor's jaw drop.

"Doctor!" Yaz shouted, "We're falling!"

"Oh! Sorry! I already disconnected the device from that generator," the Doctor said, indicating the nearest one, "Is that enough to save us for now?"

"I sure hope so," said the mysterious girl.

"Do you think you could talk me through this 'actively generating'-?" she began, but the girl flitted away and placed her gloved hands on the generator, throwing out enough energy that Yaz had to turn away from the brightness. It was like being on the ground as a bolt of lightning struck directly in front of them. Yaz had never seen anything like it; someone _controlling_ electricity and shooting it – directly out of their hands. Was she even human?

The lights all came back on at once, the floor slamming upwards to meet them as a loud alarm and a warning began to ring, signalling that they were falling and about to collide with Australia. Better late than never, she supposed. One by one, the Doctor and the stranger went about detaching the discs and powering up the generators again, at which point the questions changed from 'why would somebody want to sabotage a rain machine?' to 'who the hell are you and what are you wearing?'

"Who the hell are you?" Ryan asked.

"And what are you _wearing_?" added Yaz.

"Great questions, both of them," said the Doctor, "This suit is way too technologically advanced to be from this century. Even your fancy mask is beyond me. Who are you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Are you some kind of superhero?"

"Well, yeah, I'm the Lightning Girl. Lame name, I know, but it stuck – I always liked the Bolt or the Streak, but my roommate was all like, 'If you call yourself the Streak everyone's gonna say you're going streaking.' I don't think they would, but it never sounded as cool after that…" she mused.

"A real superhero!?" Ryan exclaimed, "That's so cool!"

"I'll give you that, it is cool. But how? And why?" the Doctor asked.

"Because… you know because," she said, sounding confused.

"Me? I don't know because. And who sabotaged this ship?"

"That's an ongoing thing, it keeps happening to the rain machines. One of them crashed two weeks ago – luckily it just went into the ocean and nobody was hurt, but it's not great for the pollution, and the operation to dredge it up and try to salvage some of it is disrupting trade routes. Stupid devices are privately manufactured and impossible to trace, even the explosives don't have a paper trail. Which is weird, because it's not exactly simple technology – not simple enough to whip up in mom's basement, at any rate."

"I'm still confused," said the Doctor, "Do I know you? I feel like I'd definitely remember meeting a girl pretending to be a superhero."

"I'm totally a superhero! It's what it says on the news, and in my Twitter bio. _The Lightning Girl: Superhero_." She put her hands on her hips. Yaz couldn't see her face but could hear the grin in her voice. She was clearly very proud of her extraordinary reputation.

"But I don't know you."

"But you do. You're the Doctor. Even if she hadn't called you 'Doctor', I recognise the two heartbeats and the sonic screwdriver anywhere," she said, "Which one are you? I've only met one other woman."

"I'm the Thirteenth Doctor."

"You're the Thirteenth Doctor, but you don't know me? We've known each other for years. It was _your_ friends who rescued me from UNIT, when…" she dropped off-midsentence and turned away from them. "…Uh-oh… Darn it… You're sure? No, I just… there's this thing… no, no, it's not important – I'll deal with it," she was obviously talking to someone. Probably had a line in her helmet. She looked up again. "I've got to go, I'm sorry. I hate running off mid-conversation, but they need me in Rio – there's a car chase, cartel drug lord, police are struggling to catch up – it's a whole thing."

"No – how can you know who I am? How can you be a superhero? None of this-"

"Doctor, I'm sorry, but I really need to go to Brazil ASAP. Life of a superhero never stops," she said, "Just – you're – go to Brighton, okay? They'll explain everything. This car chase is really hotting up, I need to go before there's a crash, alright?" With that, she disappeared, in another cacophonous flash and a streaking bolt of glowing electricity. The Lightning Girl – a bona fide superhero.

"So… she's just gone to Brazil to single-handedly take down the leader of a South American drug cartel?" Yaz asked. It had all happened so quickly – the almost-crash, the encounter with the girl, the strange hints about how she apparently knew the Doctor. The Doctor was still none the wiser, however.

"I think so," said Graham, "Should we go help her?"

"No," said the Doctor, "She can handle it."

"Do you know her?" asked Ryan.

"No, though she definitely knows me… we're going to Brighton," she decided, "First a climate change initiative I've never heard of, but now a superhero? And I love superheroes, I'd definitely remember. Let's do what she says."

"Really? I've always wanted to go to Brazil," Ryan persisted.

"I said no. Had a nightmare the last time I tried to get to Rio, anyway, ended up in a drilling operation in Wales. Very bleak. No. We're going to Brighton. And I'm taking these discs, too," she went and picked them up, the four of them, the generators now all working, "Come on. And one of you Google this Lightning Girl – see what's online about her." Yaz took it upon herself to do so, while Ryan continued to daydream about Brazil, getting out her phone. The superhero _did_ have a Twitter, too, and _millions_ of other hits. Online articles dissecting her behaviour, her actions, her psychology, trying to understand how she had her powers. There were many pro-Lightning Girl advocates online, who genuinely believed in her and all the good things she did, while many others derided her for being what they called an 'undocumented Manifest', or dangerous, saying it was only a matter of time until she made a mistake or got too excited about her power, and they needed deterrents, a way to control her.

"Well, some people love her, some hate her," said Yaz, scrolling through Chrome as they re-entered the TARDIS, "Hmm… there's this one guy, CEO of some company-"

"CyTech?" asked the Doctor.

"No, um, it's called… Prometheus," she said, after scrolling down a webpage.

" _Prometheus_? Bit pretentious."

"Guy's called Will Smiles, he's barely forty," she said, "Hates her. Obsessed with finding 'The Lightning Girl's Kryptonite.' Reckons she's dangerous."

"A wannabe Lex Luthor for a wannabe Superman," the Doctor mused.

"I wouldn't say wannabe, she saves people all the time – she really is like something out of a comic book," said Yaz, "She even stops to take selfies." She showed the Doctor a bunch of photos from a page titled 'Top 20 Lightning Girl Photo Ops' which featured her hanging out with various people. Always masked, it seemed nobody knew her identity. There were whole online forums dedicated to trying to unravel her mystery – accent experts who had apparently deduced that she was from the East Coast of America, but they couldn't be sure where because of distortions with the electronic mask she wore. People measuring her height and build from photographs, claiming that various celebrities were her, that she was actually a particularly short man or even a boy pretending to be a girl to avert suspicion, that she was multiple different people, or even that she was an advanced robot – built by CyTech, interestingly. "She was right, she's definitely famous in this decade. There's a whole segment of BBC News dedicated to her called Spark Watch. Nobody knows how she does it, or who she is." She gave Ryan her phone when he came nosing for information.

"I wonder why she wears that cool mask," he said, looking at the photos.

"To hide her identity, because she's a _superhero_ ," Yaz reiterated, taking her phone back. The Doctor was getting the TARDIS ready to leave, running hither and thither around the console, flicking switches, hitting buttons – the usual affair. "But why would she tell us to go to Brighton? If she's American? What's in Brighton? Apart from _loads_ of gay people."

"There's an aquarium," said Graham.

"Yes! Let's go to the aquarium," said the Doctor, "I love a good aquarium. Not SeaWorld, though, for obvious reasons." The TARDIS jerked as it took off, Yaz going to lean on the console as she continued trawling social media. Twitter was full of fan-drawings of the Lightning Girl, as well as her own specialist hashtag – #lightspeed – invoked whenever somebody had a problem they needed help with. Rescuing a cat from a tree, assembling flat-pack furniture, saving the victims of a nasty earthquake, defusing a hostage situation, it was all fair game. She did everything, no crime too big or too small.

"I think she's genuine," said Yaz, "Seems like she really wants to help people."

"And you think vigilante justice is the way to go about that? You're a police officer," said Graham, "The police are meant to help people."

"Seems like she gets there a lot faster than the police," said Yaz, "I can't lie – if _I_ had powers, I'd probably want to be a superhero, too. Do you think it's the suit?"

"Almost definitely," said the Doctor, "Technology like that shouldn't belong in this time period – and she says she knows me… and she knew what the TARDIS was… she could be from the future, I suppose, and that's where she got her paraphernalia."

"Maybe she'll come and tell us herself," said Graham, "Could be why she told us to go to Brighton. Maybe she lives there."

"Please – a superhero? In Brighton?" Ryan asked, "She'll be from somewhere cool, like New York, or Gotham."

"Gotham's not real," said Yaz.

"Isn't it?"

"No," said the Doctor, "But the name 'Gotham' does derive from an old 20th Century nickname given to New York. Even weirder is that comic book Gotham City is supposed to be in New Jersey. I always thought it reminded me most of Pittsburgh. City of bridges, and all that."

"What about where Superman comes from?"

"Krypton?"

"No, New York."

"Metropolis," said the Doctor, "Which is based on Toronto, originally."

"Maybe she's from Toronto, then," he shrugged.

" _Or_ Brighton," Graham reiterated.

"She's got an American accent!"

"Maybe it's fake," Yaz shrugged.

"It is an easy accent to copy," said the Doctor, then she said, " _Howdy, y'all_ ," and beamed.

"Never do that again," said Yaz.

"It was good!"

"No, it wasn't," said Ryan. The TARDIS jolted again, and the central column stopped whirring.

"I've always wanted to go to Brighton," said Yaz.

"Why?" Ryan asked her, "It's full of middle-class toffs."

"Not everyone there can be middle-class," she said.

"Statistically speaking, it would be unlikely that everyone in an entire, major city is middle-class," the Doctor added, parking up and then running around the console to get to the doors. She opened them onto the seaside at twilight, a navy-orange sky burning across the electric lights of the vibrant coast. It was hot and muggy, but the crowds were middling at that time of day. Too late for shopping, but too early for the nightlife to kick in. "Early evening on a Friday. Going by the smell, I'd say… September. Late. Maybe the 26th? Somewhere in that area." As per usual, nobody noticed the TARDIS, nor the four weirdos who stepped out of it. At first glance, 2060s Brighton wasn't much different to 2010s Sheffield. Of course it was nicer, there was less graffiti, more tourists, it didn't smell as bad – and the ocean views were gorgeous even in the dark with the neon pier floating on the sea – but it wasn't exactly the futuristic utopia of sci-fi films. She couldn't see any flying cars or atmosphere-brushing skyscrapers. It was almost disappointing.

"Is this it?" she asked.

"It's only the 2060s," said the Doctor, "What were you expecting, _Blade Runner_?"

"There's a kid on a hoverboard!" Ryan exclaimed, pointing at a teenage boy across the street. He really _was_ on a hoverboard, "That's so cool! Can I get a hoverboard?"

"There's one on the TARDIS somewhere, I'll find it for you later. I used to compete, came third, globally," the Doctor said, walking, "Would've been first in a different competition, but I got disqualified for not wearing a helmet. Health and safety gone mad. Do you know who I blame for that? Tony Hawk."

"You've met Tony Hawk?"

"Taught him everything he knows," she said, "When he did that 900, I was the one who persuaded the judges to give him another chance and break regulation time. I said Tone, listen, it's all about centre of gravity. After that, he landed – hang on a second." She stopped dead in the street, turning serious when she spotted something through a window; a television mounted on the wall inside a glass-fronted greasy spoon. Without a word, she pushed open the door and marched right over to the diner counter, the others following suit, and stared at the screen. "Scuse me," she called to a young man behind the till, waiting for orders, but it wasn't busy at that time, "Could you turn up the volume on the TV?"

"Are you going to order something?" he asked.

"Chocolate milk would be great. Anyone else for chocolate milk?" she asked the others. They shook their heads. "Just one for me." He sighed and took out a remote from behind the desk, unmuting the TV so that they could hear what was going on. It was a news item, the six o'clock news, and a severe-looking anchor was interviewing a young man in his twenties who looked more than a little uncomfortable. The summary at the bottom of the screen read: _CyTech Addresses Xboost Epidemic: Second Manifest Crisis Looms._

"… _not sure that 'epidemic' is necessarily the right word_ ," the young man said, fidgeting and avoiding looking into the cameras. " _Xboost has only been found circulating London and the surrounding areas_."

" _You don't think the existence of Xboost poses a danger to British citizens_?" the anchor asked.

" _Nobody's forcing anybody to take it. I don't see how it's more or less dangerous than any other street drug – and addiction is a societal problem, not an individual one._ "

" _You don't believe drugs need to be tackled head-on_?"

" _Well, no, not necessarily_."

" _You're in favour of recreational drug use?_ "

" _I have a lot of empathy and concern for people who struggle with addiction – it isn't a thing people ought to go to prison for, though_."

" _You don't think drug dealers should be punished? Drug pushers?_ "

" _I'm not sure that this is entirely related to the problem of Xboost_."

" _Now you admit that Xboost is a problem_?"

" _People scaremongering about it is a problem_."

The clerk cleared his throat, "Your chocolate milk?"

"Great, thanks," said the Doctor, holding out her sonic screwdriver to the electronic till.

"What's _that_?" he asked.

"New gadget. CyTech prototype," she said, lying. He shook his head and let her use the sonic to essentially steal the milk, tricking the machine into thinking she had sent it a legitimate payment.

" _My point is_ ," the awkward man resumed, " _It's been fifty years since the first Manifest Crisis – the_ only _Manifest Crisis to date, which was made a crisis by the inhumane response of our government. It's about time people stopped being looked at like they're dangerous because of genetics. How different is it really to homophobia or racism_?"

" _Nobody chooses to be gay or black, Mr Mitchell, but people do choose to take Xboost_."

" _There are plenty of genetic Manifests out there who inherited the mutation and wouldn't dream of taking drugs, and even if they did take drugs, who are we to turn our backs on them if the government threatens to re-open the concentration camps_?"

" _Concentration camps is an exaggeration, don't you think_?"

" _What would you have me say, Steve? Prison camps? Internment camps? Genetically discriminatory prisons? Silverstorm Penitentiary for the Terminally Deranged?_ "

" _Nobody is talking about re-opening facilities like Silverstorm_."

" _It seems to be the way the conversation is going_ ," he said, " _People shouldn't be so frightened of Manifests_."

"I don't get it, what's a 'manifest', what are they talking about?" Yaz asked the Doctor, slurping her chocolate milk through a straw and hanging on every word the young man said.

"He's getting off-topic, to be honest," said the Doctor.

"People give him too much shit," said the waiter, now paying attention as well, "My cousin would be homeless if it wasn't for Adam Mitchell."

"Really?" the Doctor asked, surprised.

"Yeah, but she found housing in one of CyTech's developments for the underprivileged. The underclass. CyTech has done more to tackle wealth disparity and homelessness than the bloody government if you ask me." The Doctor mused upon this.

" _But Manifests are dangerous_ ," the anchor implored, " _Look at the chaos the Lightning Girl causes. Don't you think she sets a bad precedent? Influences young people at-risk of taking Xboost into seeking it out, so that they might develop powers of their own_?"

"Did he say _powers_?" Ryan asked.

" _Personally, I don't think the Lightning Girl poses any kind of danger. She's saved innumerable lives in the last few years._ "

" _And what do you think about Will Smiles' campaign to build a deterrent for the Lightning Girl?_ "

" _I think it's horrific, and I can't understand why Smilson would ever want to neuter her._ "

" _Is it true that the Lightning Girl works for CyTech_?"

He almost laughed, " _No, not at all. As far as I'm aware, she doesn't work for anybody._ "

" _But the technology she uses in her suit-_ "

" _I can't pretend that I'm privy to who the Lighting Girl is or where she gets her equipment, but it's nothing to do with CyTech. As you know, all of CyTech's accounts and my personal account are public. We're one-hundred-per cent transparent about where all the company's income goes, and that transparency is completely voluntary because I believe people have a right to know what corporations are doing. We certainly aren't funding a vigilante superhero, as much of a fan of her as I am. I support her in an empathetic capacity_."

" _While we've got you here, Mr Mitchell, do you mind answering some questions about your own status as a Manifest? There are people who say that you're only so impassioned about them because you are one yourself, overlooking all the danger they might pose._ "

" _I'm obviously already in a position of privilege and power, advocating for Manifests not to be rounded up, monitored, documented and spied on won't change anything for me, but it will change things for the people born Manifests spending their lives terrified of being locked in one of these governmental concentration camps. Disbanding the HCC was supposed to stop things like this from happening_ -"

" _You don't think comparing the government's actions over Manifests to the Nazi regime is counter-productive_?"

" _Counter-productive to what? I don't think making more Manifests with Xboost is in anybody's best interest but talking about screening embryos for the Manifest gene is eugenics. The discussion now consists almost entirely of attempts to justify discrimination, and it's wrong whether they took Xboost willingly or were born with the latent gene. I'd also like to point out the new 'M.O.C.' initiative_."

" _A lot of people are very supportive of the M.O.C.s._ "

" _Prometheus is in support of them,_ " he said, " _These things – 'Manifest Observation Complexes' – are essentially privately-owned and operated, state-sanctioned laboratories, using humans as test subjects against their will._ "

" _And what do you think Prometheus is aiming for_?"

" _I don't know, but I'm sure Smilson doesn't have the public interest at heart when it comes to illegally incarcerating innocent Manifests._ "

" _You don't think that Prometheus manufacturing a cure for meningitis has the public interest at heart_?"

The young man grew even more annoyed at this, " _Maybe if Smilson actually made the meningitis drug available through the NHS for free, instead of charging people extortionate private healthcare prices and filing lawsuits against anyone he thinks has infringed upon his immoral patent. Those drugs should not be withheld._ "

" _A company can't operate if it gives things away for free_."

" _Any company that lets people, babies and children most of all, die of disease like meningitis, isn't one that should be allowed to operate. If they have the means to help, they should. If CyTech manufactured drugs, we wouldn't sell them for a penny_." Things apparently got too controversial from there-on, because the anchor appeared to take a message in his earpiece and then wrap things up very quickly. The awkward man, who had proven himself surprisingly articulate, didn't seem surprised.

"He has a point, about Prometheus," said the waiter, muting the television again, "I heard that Adam Mitchell lives in a one-bedroom flat in Cambridge somewhere just down the road from the HQ. Decades ago he had a mansion, but something happened to him that made him give it all away."

"Something like what?" the Doctor asked, intrigued.

"Who knows? There's a theory that he met some girl, but no one knows who this girl is. And I've always reckoned he was gay. At least, I hope he's gay."

"He was wearing a wedding ring in the interview," Yaz pointed out.

"And, um, what do you think of this Lightning Girl? Is she connected to CyTech?" the Doctor continued.

"Who knows. But I think if Adam Mitchell had his own personal superhero on CyTech's payroll, he wouldn't keep it a secret."

"Is he the CEO?" Ryan asked.

"Do you live under a rock? He was the world's youngest billionaire, like, half a century ago."

"But now he gets paid the same as all of his employees?"

"Yep."

"Wow. Wasn't expecting that from him… oh, look, I've finished my milk," said the Doctor, "Thanks for that. _Great_ milk. We'll have some chips. Chips for everybody. Go sit down."

"Sit down? Why?" Ryan asked.

"I have to explain something very heavy and complicated to you all, and you won't want empty stomachs," she said seriously. Confused, they did as she bade while the Doctor tricked the machine with the sonic again. She joined them shortly, sitting down next to Ryan at a table and tapping her foot restlessly.

"What were they talking about? On the news?" Ryan implored.

"Manifests," said the Doctor, "People who have superpowers."

"There are people who have superpowers in the future!?" Yaz whispered, "Then why is the Lightning Girl the only superhero?"

"Not in your future, no," she said seriously.

"I've never heard of this 'world's youngest billionaire' lad, either," said Graham, "Or his company, CyTech. And how is he 'half a century' old?"

"That's Adam Mitchell, I knew him once, a very long time ago. Had to boot him off the TARDIS for trying to still sensitive technology from the very distant future. I never much liked him. My friend I was with, Rose, she thought he was pretty."

Yaz shrugged, "He's alright, I suppose."

The Doctor gawked at her, "Eurgh! Really, Yaz? I thought better of you than this."

"Do you think that stuff about him having a secret wife is true? How can you have a wife nobody's ever seen if you're that famous?" Yaz wondered.

"I've got a few ideas," said the Doctor. She continued to think, muttering to herself. She didn't say another word until the waiter brought over their chips, at which point she began devouring them as quickly as she could. It seemed like _she_ was the one who didn't want to have an empty stomach. "Alright. First things first, we've accidentally landed in a parallel universe."

"A _what_?"

"How?"

"They're _real_?"

The Doctor answered every question in turn, "Parallel universe, an alternate world to our own, almost identical except for a few minor details. Details like the existence of these Manifests, among… others. The Manifests are created via a genetic mutation; you take a drug and get a superpower at random. Adam Mitchell is in his seventies, I think, and he's cryokinetic."

"What's that?" Graham asked.

"Controls ice," said Ryan, "Like Elsa. Or Frozone."

"Not as cool as Frozone," said the Doctor, "But, along those lines. He's cryogenically frozen, that's why he still looks young. Doesn't age, but I don't think he heals, either.

"Like Walt Disney?"

"That's a myth, he was never frozen, he put his brain in a big Mickey Mouse mech – watch out for that, still in your futures'." That was an alarming titbit. "In our universe, Adam ended up going mad after I got rid of him, started kidnapping people, friends of mine. But he is a genius, or so he says. I'd also wager he _does_ know this Lightning Girl. But where there are two Adam Mitchells, there are two of everything else."

"What do you mean?" asked Graham, "Like, evil versions of people?"

"Not evil, just different. That girl, the Lightning Girl, said something about only knowing one female Doctor, and it wasn't me," she said, "And the thing is, I know what universe we're in, and I've met this alternate, female Doctor she's talking about."

"So, it's you, but not you?" Yaz frowned.

"Physically, in this universe, I regenerated into a different form. I'm still 'the Doctor', but not quite."

"I don't get it," said Graham, "Wouldn't we notice if we went into a _different universe_?"

"Not necessarily. Once upon a time, the TARDIS was completely dead for hours after I accidentally dropped into a parallel world. But there was this thing – an event – that made _all_ the infinite multiverses uniform and able to be traversed without, you know, imploding. Now you can walk between them in certain places, especially this one and ours. They're not completely separate…" She picked up a napkin and took out a pen, drawing two straight, parallel lines, "These are your regular parallel universes, running alongside each other, never connecting. The gap between them is called the Void, or sometimes Hell, depending on your preference. Suffice it to say, you don't want to go through hell, not _literally_. It's so empty nothing can survive, not even the laws of physics.

"But our home universe and this one we're in right now – which we could really do with coming up with some catchy nicknames for – are a bit more like…" Now she turned over the napkin and drew two more lines, both zigzagging and crossing over each other. "See? The Void is still there, but there are certain intersections where you can pass from one to the other seamlessly, without even realising. That's what's happened to us, now."

"Right… but what's the whole thing about there being two of you?"

"Only two women, that I know of. Me, and the one who lives here. That Lightning Girl knows me, the _other_ me, and she told us to go to Brighton. I'd hazard a guess that this other version of me is in Brighton somewhere. And where the other Doctor is, the other Clara won't be far behind."

"Your old friend?" Yaz asked. The Doctor did not talk often about her old friends, usually mentioning them only in passing, throwaway lines, never explaining in-depth. She kept shovelling chips into her mouth.

"Yes. Brighton is exactly the kind of place Clara would be, and the Doctor won't leave her side." Yaz didn't bother to point out the incongruity of that statement; if she knew the Doctor wouldn't leave Clara's side, then why had _she_ ever left _her_ version of Clara's side?

"Why do we need to find another Doctor, though?" Ryan implored.

"See if she knows anything about whoever's trying to sabotage the rain machines. And I don't know, I haven't seen her for a long time, we could have a girly catch-up. See what's what, why she's spending time in Brighton. I wasn't very friendly the last time I saw her. Then again, I don't remember her being too friendly, either…" An unfriendly version of the Doctor sounded like an anomaly. "There's something going on here, something with that Lightning Girl, with Adam Mitchell, and these Manifests. If she told us to find me, she must have a reason."

"So what do we need to do?" said Graham.

"I'm a notoriously hard to pin-down person, but Clara's always been more grounded. To find me, we find her, and if I know anything about Clara – and trust me, I do – we need to search the gay bars."


	22. Double Blind - Chapter 2

_Double Blind_

 _2_

Searching Brighton's gay bars was easier said than done. One wouldn't be wrong for saying Brighton was just one, big gay bar. Every inch of it was dripping in rainbow flags and bright symbols. They were hanging from windows, painted on walls, worn as accessories. It was next to impossible to tell which venues were gay and which were just gay-friendly, and Yaz wasn't sure that in that part of the future those two things weren't one and the same. Suffice it to say, they'd had to split up. Yaz went with Graham, while Ryan stuck with the Doctor, who didn't give them much to go on. Yaz suspected she was withholding information on purpose.

"You'd think she might have a photograph or two lying around," said Graham as they stuck their heads in yet another bar, this one playing loud music that felt like razor blades against Yaz's ears it was so awful. She kept getting ID'd, and her old driving license was confounding all the bouncers. She'd been denied entry in at least one pub for not being able to conjure up believable proof of age. At least she was with Graham, though; _he_ wasn't going to get ID'd.

"She hasn't got any photographs of us."

"The TARDIS has records, I've seen them," said Graham. The Doctor had provided them with a very barebones description; apparently, they were searching for two white women, a blonde and a brunette; the brunette was Clara. Aside from that, she had been foggy on the details.

"Why gay bars? If you were travelling through all of time and space-"

"Which we are," Graham reminded her after they drew another blank in a lesbian bar which didn't take kindly to his presence and escaped into the muggy, summer night again.

"Well, why would you come to a gay bar? On Earth? _Here_?"

"Suppose we'll ask her when we find her."

"Easier said than done. Looking for a woman with a relatively normal name with brown hair… that's most of the women I've seen out here," Yaz complained, "Do you think the Doctor's keeping something from us?"

"Maybe? But, like what?"

"I don't know. She never talks about the people she used to travel with, haven't you noticed? I forget sometimes we're not the first… she never says why she stopped travelling with them, either."

The conversation ran dry when they went to a male-centric bar indiscriminately named _The Back Passage_. It was a living, breathing cliché, full of gimps.

"Bloody hell…" said Graham. Yaz braved the bar and called down a bartender wearing little more than a leather harness. Unfortunately, _The Back Passage_ was not a place frequented by anybody named Clara, or the Doctor (or any woman at all) – though she was assured that plenty of the patrons _were_ doctors. One of them offered Graham what might be construed as an inappropriate examination he was forced to decline.

"I can't imagine the Doctor spending a lot of time in a gay bar. Or any bar, for that matter. Or even any place at all for more than a few hours," said Yaz.

"Well, she did say to look for the girl first, and then we'd find this other Doctor with her. You can't pretend you're not interested in meeting another Doctor." Yaz was more interested in finding out about her mysterious companion, but Graham was right; she _couldn't_ pretend. Another Doctor, another woman? It _was_ an exciting prospect.

"Do you think there're versions of us in this 'other universe'?"

"Maybe," Graham said.

"Maybe we've never met the Doctor."

"Maybe Grace would still be…"

"Oh. Yeah. Sorry. I shouldn't have brought that up," she said quickly, feeling immediately guilty. It was a sad truth that Grace's death was related to the Doctor's presence in their lives, even if it had been a tragic accident… "Probably won't see ourselves here, though. Not in Brighton, in the future. I've never been a fan of the south."

"I'll pretend I'm not offended by that," he said. She laughed a little.

Eventually, though, Yaz began to wonder that perhaps the Doctor was wrong. Wrong about where to find this woman, because they were drawing a blank in every single place they went. Nobody knew the name, nobody could provide them with additional details, a surname. She was beginning to wonder that they wouldn't have more luck searching through a phone book for _anyone_ called 'Clara', or even searching on the internet like she'd done to find the Lightning Girl. With all the shops closed, it was only social spots they could investigate, many of which were now slowly filling up with people seeking a hearty dinner and air conditioning. Yaz was now glad the Doctor had convinced them to eat some chips.

They found themselves straying further into the suburbs, streets that didn't have as much life as the city centre and only a smattering of night venues.

"Do you see that?" Yaz asked, subtly indicating to Graham a woman across the street standing outside of a run-down building with a cigarette. "I can't believe people still smoke in this day and age."

"Tell me about it. I can hardly believe they still smoke in 2019," he sighed, "The amount of damage cigarettes have done to the human race – makes you wonder if there's any point trying to get us to quit."

"I seriously thought they'd be illegal by this point in time."

"Well, lots of things are illegal and people still get their hands on them."

"I suppose. Come on," Yaz shook her head, disillusioned with the future, and they went on their way. Until the girl with the cigarette started shouting.

For a split second, Yaz thought she was shouting at _them_ , like she'd somehow heard their disapproval of a stranger's cigarette habit, but she'd flicked the cigarette onto the curb where the glowing stub began to burn itself out, turning into the alleyway behind her.

"Hold on, what's going on there?" Yaz said, squinting. It was hard to see in the shadows, the streetlamps not illuminating the area very well.

"Nothing good," said Graham. He looked up the street both ways, then began to cross, Yaz following at his heels. She wasn't sure how he was planning on intervening, but _she_ had police training up her sleeve. Though in a world where people had superpowers, she didn't know how useful that would be; she'd never tried to arrest Superman.

But she was horrified when they came close enough to see what was happening: a police officer, male, tall, and grizzled, was in the middle of berating a teenager girl young enough to still be in school. He had a pair of handcuffs out and ready to use, while the girl was backing away towards the wall. Arguing from a few feet away was the smoker.

"It's the _law_ , miss," the police officer said to the smoker, the girl trapped in the dead-end alleyway, "A Manifest using their powers is intimidation."

"She didn't use any powers," the smoker argued, "You don't know if she's a Manifest."

"I was drugged," the girl said, beginning to sob, "Somebody drugged me, please."

"Typical junkie-talk," said the copper, "Come on, princess. Don't resist arrest or the charges will be much worse."

"Arrest!? You don't have anything to charge with! She hasn't committed a crime!"

"She threatened me-"

"She did no such fucking thing, I've been right there for the last five minutes. You chased her down here and trapped her – it's completely immoral, and illegal. How about I report _you_ for wrongful arrest?"

He laughed at her, "The Xboost epidemic needs to be contained with any means necessary."

"And attacking innocent people you just _suspect_ of being Manifests is a part of that now, is it? And I didn't want to believe the rumours that the government were being fucking complicit – but I suppose since Prometheus doesn't have a private army, somebody has to be marching them to those prisons."

"M.O.C.s are not prisons, they're rehabilitation facilities."

"Really? Because I'm reminded of a regime in the 1940s who had very similar descriptions for what _they_ were doing. I try to see the best in people, but maybe the police really are fascists." Yaz didn't take kindly to that, but under the circumstances, she did not intervene. The stranger talked quite quickly and always had her next sentence prepared, which didn't give Yaz and Graham – powerless voyeurs – a chance to do anything. Neither of them knew enough about the political situation to weigh in, but the girl was growing more and more distressed.

"You're very passionate about Manifests," he said coldly, studying her. She froze up for a few seconds. _Uh-oh_ , Yaz thought.

"There's a difference between being a Manifest and being a person with basic empathy."

"She's a criminal, and if you don't leave, you will be, too. Aiding and abetting."

"Oh, sure. Just rattle off your bullshit charges at me."

"No!" the girl protested as the officer approached her again. She kicked wildly in his direction and managed to strike him in the shin.

"You little bitch," he cursed, wincing. That was all the intimidation he needed. In a second he had unhooked the stocky truncheon from his belt. The girl slipped, fell to the floor, screaming in horror as he raised the weapon. What they saw next, however, they were not prepared for. As soon as he began the strike, the stranger disappeared in a cloud of black smoke, only to reappear instantaneously between the vulnerable girl and the violent policeman. He didn't hesitate, bringing down truncheon and striking the smoker hard in the side of her face, knocking her to the floor. Yaz was sure they had just witnessed a teleport, one the likes of which she had never seen.

It was only set to get more chaotic, though. Upon seeing what had happened to her attempted rescuer, the girl wailed and then lunged for the officer. She grabbed hold of his face before he could defend herself. Yaz knew an attempted gouge when she saw one, but this time it took a much nastier turn. The police officer was suddenly the one in pain, the one shrieking. He collapsed to his knees and the girl let go, revealing a big, blistering wound on his face in the shape of a handprint. The girl's hand shone strangely in the glow from the streetlamp, a greenish substance clinging to the skin.

"Oh, no…" she said, staring at what she had done.

"Go, get out of here," the stranger, crouched on the floor and nursing her face, ordered, waving her arm towards the alleyway exit. The girl did as advised, fleeing, Graham and Yaz dodging to either side lest they meet the same face as the burned police officer.

"You Manifests… you're fucking monsters…" the police officer said, clutching his hands to his face. It was the stranger's turn to escape. She staggered to her feet and also ran off, barely noticing Yaz and Graham. Without a word, Yaz took off in her pursuit. At any rate, she would have knowledge of whatever was going on with the Manifests, and she couldn't stand by and let police brutality fly. It was her responsibility as a police officer herself to stop things like that happening. But being as she wasn't working in the 2060s, wasn't in uniform, and doubted she would command the respect of the violent copper anyway, she thought ensuring the victims were okay was a better use of her time.

She followed the stranger down the road for a very short distance, until she turned into a nondescript, graffitied-on doorway. But Yaz wasn't prepared to see her literally pass _through_ the door like she was a ghost, like it wasn't even there. She almost walked flat into the wood herself.

"Come on, I think he's following us. I don't want to end up in a holding cell with that maniac outside," Graham said, "Who'd hit a young girl like that?" Yaz pushed open the door, hearing the lumbering copper on their trail. It opened onto a thin, crooked staircase with another, darkened doorway at the bottom. The pair of them scrambled down the stairs to get away from the pursuer.

Yet again, they were surprised. First police violence, then superpowers, and now an underground pub. It was very empty, stripped brick walls, a stained bar, rickety wooden tables and a TV not quite as advanced as the one in the café they'd been in earlier. There were two male patrons sitting at a table in the corner with a pint of beer between them, then a blonde girl with an accent in the middle of a very animated argument with the young bartender.

"You're just ignoring all of the inherent problems with Perestroika," she said, "Those economic policies are US-led and only went to further the demise of the Soviet Union."

"And _you're_ ignoring the inherent problems with _the entire Soviet Union_."

"Gorbachev was – oh my god, what happened to your face?" the blonde, whom Yaz now realised was American, asked the stranger.

"Cover for me," she said, grabbing a jacket from the blonde's lap where she'd had it folded up. The stranger also stole a fedora from on top of the bartender's head. Graham tugged on Yaz's elbow to pull her over to an empty table, while the stranger put on the hat and the jacket and went to lift up the lid on an antique piano standing against the wall. She began to play something Yaz recognised just as they heard the door forced open above. Seconds later, the police officer and his burned face burst in, waving the truncheon around like he was _itching_ for somebody to hit. The girl just kept right on playing the piano, while Yaz tried to work out what the song was.

"Did a girl just come in here?" he demanded.

"A girl?" asked the bartender, "No, I don't think so. Nobody's come in or out for about half an hour."

"You're full of it," he said, "Where is she?" His vision was impaired by the wound, so he only had one eye in working order.

"Haven't seen anybody, big guy," said the American, leaning on the bar.

"…Who runs this place?"

"I do," said the American quickly, cutting across the bartender.

"Do you have a liquor license?"

"A _liquor license_? What kind of bar proprietor would I be if I didn't have a liquor license?" From the back pocket of her jeans, she took out a black, battered leather wallet, flipping it open and holding it up to the officer. Only, the paper inside the wallet was completely blank. Yaz looked at Graham, eyes wide, and he gave her a look that told her he had seen it too: psychic paper. The officer came lumbering over and squinted at the page. "Take your time. I'm here all night."

"Hrmph…" he grunted, "And you say you didn't see a girl come through here? A Manifest?"

"I wouldn't let a Manifest in my establishment. Too dangerous," said the American coolly, withdrawing the psychic paper and putting it away again. "Is everything in order?"

"…Must've gone somewhere else…" he turned to leave.

"Well, don't be a stranger! I always love a visit from the boys in blue, what with me being such an upstanding citizen," the American called after him. "You might wanna check out a hospital for your face!" They heard him clamber up the stairs pass through the door on street-level and leave. There was still a long pause while everybody in the bar made sure that he was gone. The stranger stopped playing the piano abruptly. " _Tainted Love_? Really?" the American asked as she got down from her barstool to go and see to the stranger. _That_ was the song, Yaz realised.

"I thought it was fitting," she said, then began to play the first verse again and half-sang, " _Sometimes I feel I've got to, run away, I've got to, get away_ -"

"Lemme look at your face," she said, sitting down with her legs straddling the piano bench, grabbing the stranger's chin and turning it gently so she could see the wound. "Oh, Coo, why did he hit you? What's going on?"

"I merely did what anyone would do."

"Which was what? Couldja get me some ice, Raj?" she called over her shoulder at the bartender.

"Sure, Doctor," he said. Yaz almost gasped.

"Intervening in an act of deplorable police brutality," said the smoker, "He was trying to hit this girl. She burned his face with acid-hands."

"Acid hands? Nice."

" _Maybe_ he saw me teleport."

"Do you think he could recognise you?"

"Um…"

"We'd better deal with that… later." Raj walked out from around the bar and handed the American a tea towel full of broken ice cubes. She held it up to the bloody wound on the side of the smoker's face. "Socked you right by your eye."

"Do you think it'll bruise?"

"Yeah. Sorry about that."

"You should kiss it better." _That_ took Yaz by surprise.

She laughed, "I would, but I don't know where that truncheon's been. Probably covered in bacon grease – damn pigs. Stay still. It's not so bad, luckily. Why didn't you just phase?"

"It all happened very fast, I don't know."

"You never phase when you need to." The smoker grimaced.

"I hope he doesn't come back here and find out we actually _don't_ have a liquor license," Raj mumbled, "Can I have my hat back?"

"You should get rid of this hat," said the smoker, "It gives you a vibe. Like you're a fuckboy from 2010."

"It gives _you_ the same vibe," said the American.

"Ah, but I _am_ a fuckboy from 2010, sweetheart."

"Ain't that the truth," she muttered, knocking off the hat from the girl's head onto the floor.

"Wow," she said monotonously, looking at the fallen hat, "Domestic violence."

"Stay still. Do you have a concussion?"

"Excuse me," Yaz finally interjected, getting up from her table and addressing them. "Are you Clara?"

"Depends who's asking," said the smoker.

"And you're the Doctor?" Yaz asked the American.

"That's my name, don't wear it out."

"Thank god! We've been looking for you all over, both of you," said Yaz.

Raj cleared his throat to talk to her, however, "I'm afraid this bar is for Manifests only. If you're not a Manifest, then-" He disappeared into thin air. Nobody else took much note of this. The Doctor and Clara merely looked at the place where he had been, the Doctor still with her hands on Clara's face so she could nurse the injury. Was she wearing a wedding ring?

"What's happened?" Graham asked them.

"He does that sometimes," Clara explained. They waited, and after a brief interval, Raj reappeared. "Where'd you go?"

"Colombia, 1979. The set of _Cannibal Holocaust_."

"Awesome!" the Doctor exclaimed, beaming, "That's one heck of a movie."

"I might be sick…" he muttered, shaking his head. A Manifest, clearly – with the power to travel through time?

Behind Yaz and Graham, the doors were thrown open. For a horrible second, she thought it must be the copper returning, but to her immense relief, it was the Doctor – the _real_ Doctor – followed by Ryan. She took one glance around the room, then grinned and pointed at the _other_ Doctor and Clara with both arms.

"Yaz! Graham! You found them! Well done!"

"You didn't say they were a _couple_ ," Yaz told her.

"…Didn't I?"

"Wait, what?" Ryan asked.

"We're married," Clara interrupted, standing up from the piano, "But who are you? Why are you looking for us?" They were _married_!?

"It's me! The Doctor! You!" she pointed at the American, "Only not _quite_ you."

"Wait, you're, like, my future?" she asked.

" _No_!" the Doctor laughed and shook her head, "Hang on, let me think… Ah! You used to call me Old Twelvey."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa… you're _that_ jerk-off?" the American grew much colder as soon as she was given this news. "And you're _here_? I think you might be a bit lost. Took a wrong turn at an interdimensional rift, or something."

"You definitely didn't say anything about being married to her," Yaz persisted.

"I was never married to her," said the Doctor, "That's their thing. I wouldn't say I'm the marriage type, they never seem to end well. Eh, no offence. I'm sure you two are going to have a long, happy marriage. I hope you do."

"I don't," Clara muttered.

"Here I am tending to your wounds – and for what?" the American Doctor argued.

"You tell me. Raj – could you get us some drinks?"

"Erm… maybe you should go," he said, "Sorry, but we should probably close up in case that arsehole brings a patrol around."

"What happened?" asked the real Doctor.

"A kid outside got attacked for being one of these Manifests, by a police officer," Graham explained, "Clara stepped in and took the blow for her so she could get away from him, but then he followed her down here."

"Did he have a big burn on his face?"

"That's the one."

"We walked past him," said Ryan, "He was radioing for backup."

"Then we're closing. Nate, Johan," Raj called at the two men in the corner, who hadn't said a word and kept themselves to themselves, "We're closing, to avoid the police. Sorry. Closed for the next week, to be safe."

"Right you are, Raj," nodded one of them. They made their exit while Clara and the American gathered up their things.

"What's this crap?" Clara asked. She'd tried to put her hands in her pockets, the pockets of a hoodie which she had taken from the American Doctor. She opened her palm to reveal a curled-up trading card.

"That's a Shiny Charizard, Clara – it's worth, like, thousands of dollars. Educate yourself," she snatched the card from Clara. "I was wondering where this went! What else is in those pockets?"

"God knows, but now my hands are sticky. Here, you can have it back," she took off the hoodie and returned it to the American Doctor.

"Nice to know my clothes aren't good enough for you anymore."

"Well, I'm actually wearing your underwear right now, so." That was _way_ too much information. None of them had a _clue_ how to react to that throwaway comment. "What is it you four want from us, exactly? Can't you just take the TARDIS and go back to your own universe?"

"We were told to come here," the Doctor explained, "We ran into the Lightning Girl. She told us to come to Brighton."

"Nice of her to give us some forewarning," the American Doctor complained, heading off towards the door. Yaz knew what the Real Doctor had meant about her being unfriendly now. "I guess you'd better come with us, then. Unless you wanna stick around for a police raid?" They hastened to follow the other Doctor and Clara back up to the street, where they began to lead them in the opposite direction of the city centre. Out towards the suburbs.

"So you do know her? The Lightning Girl?" the Doctor asked, keeping up with them while Yaz, Ryan and Graham drifted behind.

"She's a good friend," said Clara, "Comes for dinner sometimes, and for D&D night. I can't believe date night's been cut so short," she addressed this now to the American Doctor, her _wife_ , a revelation which had stunned Yaz (all of them, in fact) into silence. "We were gonna go to the cinema."

"We can go next week."

"It's only the one-hundredth anniversary of _Dr. Strangelove_ for so long, sweetheart."

"Coo, we have a time machine."

"Coo!" exclaimed the Real Doctor. They both looked at her. "I mean… I forgot you called her that. It's cute! Isn't it cute, Yaz?"

"Uh, yeah, sure…"

"Where are we going? To your TARDIS?"

"The TARDIS?" the American Doctor almost laughed, "No. Can't say I know where the TARDIS is at the moment."

"You lost the TARDIS!?"

" _No_ , I did not lose it, it's just… under new management. Jenny has it."

"Who's Jenny?" asked Graham. Yaz couldn't believe the Doctor would trust anybody else with her TARDIS.

"My daughter," said the American Doctor.

"Daughter?" Yaz was shocked, "First you have a secret wife, now you have a secret daughter?"

"You've never asked me if I have a daughter!" the Real Doctor protested, "I don't see her very often. Speaking of seeing people, though, I saw Adam Mitchell, on the TV. He's more of a socialist than I remember."

"He's a dirty commie, and I _love_ that about him," said the American Doctor, "The unmitigated filthiness of leftist political thinking. The degeneracy is exquisite." Clara laughed.

"Is it still going out with your sister?"

"Oh, sure," said Clara, "They've been married for ages, although she still has a habit of calling him her boyfriend."

"Our favourite brother-in-law." So they _did_ know the Lightning Girl, _and_ Adam Mitchell, very well. Here was a Doctor with connections to people, family connections – wife, daughter, brothers and sisters-in-law. It was a far cry from the isolation of their Doctor.

"Yeah – what's the deal with this Xboost thing?" the Doctor pressed them.

"It's a street drug that makes Manifests," said Clara, "But Manifests are… not thought of too kindly."

"Remind me, again, I'm a little foggy on the details."

"Well, to become a Manifest, you either have to be drugged with the Manifest serum and then have an adrenaline boost to trigger the powers to 'manifest', or you have to be a genetic descendant of one of the people who was drugged with the serum," said Clara, "The original Manifest Crisis lasted for, like, twenty years, until my sister managed to come up with a universal cure. Not that everybody took it, and even if they did, the mutation remained latent."

"If she made a cure, why are you still a Manifest?"

"Time vortex interferes with it," the American Doctor said, "Creates an additional strain. Oswin calls it a 'corrupted strain.' She hasn't been able to cure that one, not that anybody's really been asking her too. I guess they've all been grateful that you drugged them."

"What?" Yaz asked.

"Oh…" the Real Doctor mumbled, looking sheepish, "I forgot about that…"

"What happened? What have we missed?" Graham asked.

"There was this coffee," the American Doctor talked over the Real one, "Imbued with the Manifest serum. Clara and Rose took it originally, Oswin gave some to Adam because… well, she's crazy, she does things like that. And then you decided to give the remains that had been soaking in temporal radiation for months to everybody else, remember? Because I'm pretty sure they do."

"Maybe my last regeneration wasn't the best… but, well, who can honestly look back at themselves a few years ago and not be embarrassed?"

"She's got a point," said Clara.

" _What_?" the American Doctor was affronted that Clara didn't immediately take her side.

"You don't like any of the other Doctors, any of your past selves. Not even Eleven." Whatever that meant, and Yaz wasn't entirely sure, it made her shut up. "Sorry – what are your names, again? I didn't quite catch them – I'm Clara, Oswald."

"This is Yasmin Khan, Ryan Sinclair, and Graham O'Brien," the Doctor introduced them in turn, "Graham's a bus driver, Ryan works in a warehouse, Yaz is in the police."

"The _police_?" the American Doctor said disdainfully.

"Then I'm a teacher," said Clara, ignoring her wife, "We both are."

"Both of you?" the Doctor frowned, "Teaching what?"

"English. She's History because there weren't any science vacancies."

"And, what? You're saying you _live here_? You actually live _in Brighton_? You have a _job_?" the Doctor stared at her counterpart.

"At least I don't hang out with cops."

"Calm down, sweetheart. Jenny worked with the police for a while."

"Jenny has a habit of working with undesirable people. Never had a moral job in her life, apart from the bakery. And even then, everybody in that village is brainwashed," the American Doctor said. They were finally out of the city centre, truly in Brighton's middle-class suburbia. "Why didn't we take the car?"

"Because we don't live that far, parking in the city is a nightmare, and I was planning on drinking," Clara told her. Then she reached into her coat pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes, Marlboros.

"I can't believe people in the future still smoke," Yaz said, voicing her complaints from earlier.

"It is quite grim," the Real Doctor agreed. Clara was indifferent, lighting her cigarette with what looked like an antique, silver lighter with strange carvings on it. "What _is_ that?" the Real Doctor said. Clara showed it to her.

"Present," she said, "For our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary."

"You got her a cigarette lighter?" the Real Doctor asked the American Doctor incredulously.

"It's a battle I've given up. She never quits for more than two weeks at a time."

"I've been violently assaulted by an officer of the law, so I'm going have a cigarette, thank you very much," and then Clara blew smoke in the American Doctor's face on purpose, who coughed and waved her hand. Yaz hated the stench.

"Did you say twenty-fifth anniversary?" Graham asked.

"Last year was fifty," said Clara, "Two-thirds of my life, _wasted_."

"But you don't look anywhere near old enough."

"I'm being kept eternally young," said Clara, "Technological intervention. And before you start on wifey-poo here-"

"Call me that again and you'll regret it," the American muttered. Clara ignored her.

"-it was actually my sister who did it. She's dead, see. A hologram. She couldn't bear the thought of me growing old and dying." It was only then that Yaz noticed Clara had a large scar running the full length of her left arm, a burn spreading from the back of her hand, worst at her wrist, and then up towards her shoulder. She decided not to ask about it, however.

"How is Oswin? She still, erm…" the Doctor began, but was unsure what to say.

"Still what? Broken? Unable to walk or be left alone for more than ten minutes at a time? Very much so. She's okay at the moment, though. Still on the TARDIS, with Adam and Jenny."

"What about everybody else?" the Doctor asked. Clara faltered, but something else caught her attention.

"Ah, here we are," she said, indicating a house they were approaching. It was, on the whole, a very regular looking house. The only notable thing was a vivid blue, 1960s Volkswagen camper van sitting in the driveway. They turned into the drive towards the front door.

"A _house_!?" the Doctor exclaimed, "A house!? A car!? A wife!? A job!? _No TARDIS_!?" Yaz, too, could not quite believe that these Doctors were the same person. But neither the American Doctor nor Clara Oswald offered an explanation, Clara taking a set of keys out of her pocket and unlocking the front door. Inside, the lights were on. "Next you'll tell me you have kids!"

"Funny you should say that…" Clara mumbled.

"What? _What_? Don't tell me – you don't – you can't-"

"Rose?" Clara called when she opened the door, "We have guests, so you better not have eaten all my ice cream."

"I was saving it for later," a London accent called back, "You said you wouldn't be back until eleven. It's barely eight." Clara held the door open for the other four to enter. They found themselves in a living room with two armchairs and a sofa, stacked high with books and photographs (many of Clara and the other Doctor), and a fish tank in the corner. In the armchair closest to the glass television, a young woman was sitting, who looked around in surprise at the interlopers. "Who're these?"

"Rose!" exclaimed the Real Doctor, "It's been so long!"

"Who are you?"

"Old Twelvey's regenerated into a hyperactive Yorkshirewoman," Clara explained.

"Oh, right. And who are they?"

"New blood, I suppose," said Clara, "Where's Matts?"

"Upstairs, she's on the phone, or video chat, something like that," Rose shrugged.

"You _do_ have kids! I can't believe this!" the Real Doctor exclaimed.

"She's not theirs," said Rose, indifferent, turning back to the TV. She looked very comfortable, not wearing shoes and curled up in the chair with a cup of tea in her hands. She was watching _Come Dine With Me_. Nice to know they still had that in the future.

"Matilda is Mickey and Martha's daughter," the American Doctor said, kicking off her shoes. The Real Doctor, along with Yaz, Ryan and Graham, all sat down in a cramped line on the sofa.

"What happened to your face?" Rose called after Clara when Clara went into the kitchen.

"Got attacked by a cop for being a Manifest. Hit me in the face with a truncheon."

"Probably enjoyed it," said Rose.

"Ha, ha."

"Why are they here? Did they lose their TARDIS?"

"They ran into Esther and Esther told them to come here, or so they say," said the American Doctor. Was that the Lightning Girl's name? Esther?

"We met her on a rain machine," the Real Doctor leant forwards to talk to them, "Someone planted bombs on it, professionally manufactured bombs, she said were designed to detonate when _she_ touched them. And she said it wasn't the first time it had happened. But I'm way more interested in Mickey and Martha's daughter, why is she here? Where are they?"

"Well, they…" Rose began.

"They died," the American Doctor said, "In July. Just a few months ago. We have the house and the jobs in a school, so we were the ones who became her guardians."

"I'm her godmother, though," Rose added, "Jack's the godfather."

"How old is she?"

"Well, she ages slowly, because she's a Manifest," said the American Doctor, "Because somebody gave her parents drugged, Manifest serum coffee, so she inherited the gene from them. She takes about three years to visibly age one year. We call them long-years and short-years. She's fifteen in long-years, fifty in short-years."

"Seems like an inefficient system," said the Real Doctor.

"Do you have a better one?" Rose asked, eyes fixed on the TV, "Oh, mate… that meringue mixture is _not_ set properly…" The woman on the TV tipped a bowl of meringue over her head, and true to Rose's word, it slid out of the bowl and landed on her hair. "She's not gonna score higher than a five from anyone, I guarantee."

Clara returned to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room having retrieved an icepack she now had pressed against the side of her face, "Who's for tea?" she asked.

"Oh, I'll do it," said the American Doctor, "You go find the disinfectant and fix your face – not that there's much that _can_ be fixed when it comes to _your_ face."

"Funny," Clara said dryly as the American Doctor walked past her, casting a smirk in her direction, and went into the kitchen, "I don't know where the first aid kit is."

"It's literally right next to you, near Captain Nemo. Because he bit me again last week? Remember?"

"I did tell you to make sure to wear the chainmail," said Clara, turning towards the fish tank and searching around aimlessly on the floor next to it.

"Who's 'Captain Nemo'?" Ryan asked the Real Doctor in a whisper, but she just shrugged. They were all trying to take in their surroundings. The house's contents were certainly weird enough to belong to the Doctor: the books, for one thing, crawling over every available surface, but there was also a video cassette player underneath the TV. Yaz's attention was drawn to all the photographs, though, mostly wedding photographs, but the strange thing was they looked like they were different weddings.

"Rose, could you go see if Mattie wants any tea?" the American Doctor called through again, "But tell her she has to come downstairs to get it." Rose sighed and didn't respond. For a second Yaz thought she would ignore the request but was alarmed when the girl simply disappeared in a flurry of gold dust.

"What was _that_!? That's not a normal teleport," the Real Doctor was horrified at what she had seen. Clara had just found the first aid kit, however, a green box that had gotten kicked underneath the armchair and was tearing open a sterile antiseptic wipe.

"Better than my shite teleports," Clara muttered, flinching while she cleaned the bloody wound on her face. It was going to come out in a nasty bruise, Yaz could tell. "It's just Rose, you know how she is. The Bad Wolf, and all that."

"No human being – no living creature at all – should have that much power," the Real Doctor said seriously. Clara only laughed, and then Rose was able to speak for herself, reappearing in the same haze of gold sparkles outside the kitchen.

"Mattie says she'll have tea," Rose said, holding out her own, empty mug to the American Doctor, who disappeared into the kitchen again after nodding.

"The Yorkshire Doctor is questioning whether you've been corrupted by power," Clara remarked.

"What? I'm fine," Rose dismissed her, "I get enough of that from my husband."

"Who's your husband?" Ryan asked.

"The Doctor," she said.

" _What_?" Yaz stared at the Real Doctor, "The Doctor!? You've been married to _two_ humans!?"

"This is a parallel universe!" the Doctor protested, "I didn't marry Rose, either."

"Just fell in love with her, pining from afar," said Clara, using her phone screen as a mirror while she sorted out her injury.

"I wouldn't say I was pining."

"I would," said Rose, sitting back down in front of the TV. "You haven't told these three an awful lot, have you? Did you tell them about River? Because she's someone you definitely _did_ marry in both universes."

"Uh…" the Doctor faltered, "We haven't really had the time to get into those sorts of details…"

"Wait until they find out about Elizabeth I and Marilyn Monroe," Clara jibed, making Rose laugh. Elizabeth I!? _Marilyn Monroe_!?

"Hey!" the American shouted through, "Don't say her name! You'll summon her, and you know how tetchy she is." Clara rolled her eyes.

"We keep her ghost in a jar upstairs," she said, like this was any sort of legitimate explanation a reasonable person would accept.

"Sorry, Marilyn's ghost?" the Real Doctor asked.

"Yeah. We thought it was a hoax, but then we tried to watch _Some Like it Hot_ and she went all poltergeist. It's impossible to have a conversation with her."

"And you had a thing for that girl on the space- _Titanic_ , Astrid, right?" Rose continued, "And what about Christina?"

"I wasn't interested in Christina like that!" the Doctor protested.

"Amy tried to shag you," said Clara.

"Well, she was very confused."

"So many young, vulnerable women."

The American Doctor returned to the doorway, "I can hear you, you know. If I was a vindictive person, I'd bring up one of the dozens of other people _you've_ slept with." She vanished before Clara could argue about this.

"Unbelievable…"

"You have shagged _loads_ of people, to be fair," said Rose.

"Forget about this, nobody's interested in Clara's back catalogue," the Real Doctor said. Yaz certainly wasn't. "I'm more interested in you claiming to be the Bad Wolf, again. That power is going to destroy you. You can't handle it."

"God, you're like a broken bloody record," Rose shook her head, "I'm literally a god."

"How can you be a god?" Graham asked.

"I can manipulate all of time and space and the entire universe," she said, "But only the one universe, though. Couldn't do anything in yours. I'm just a… vessel, for the time vortex, though. It doesn't control me, and I don't even try to control _it_." Rose was saved from having to explain further when an eighth person entered the room, a teenage girl. She absorbed all of the Real Doctor's attention from the moment she appeared, stopping dead when she saw how many people were there.

"What's going on?" the girl, who must be Mattie, asked, "You aren't having D&D night without me, are you? You can't do that – I have all the mana potions."

"No, sweetheart," Clara said, "This is the Doctor. From another universe. And these are her companions."

"Sorry, can I just – you look just like her," the Real Doctor said, staring, "Like a small Martha. If Martha wore glasses and didn't have any tattoos."

"Oh. Thanks. What happened to your face?" she turned back to Clara.

"Got attacked for being annoying, probably," said Rose.

"It wasn't for being annoying," Clara snapped.

"Are you sure? You are quite annoying."

"I got hit by a police officer who was trying to illegally assault a Manifest, I stepped in," Clara said, "The girl got away, thank god. Then he called for backup to raid the bar we were in."

"What kind of dodgy bar was it?" she asked, sitting down on the arm of Rose's chair.

"Illegal Manifest speakeasy."

"What are you gonna tell people at school?"

"Tell them my wife hits me," she said, taking out a plaster. Yaz hoped that was a joke.

"Coo, can you help me with the mugs?" the American Doctor shouted. Clara set the first aid kit down and returned momentarily performing quite the feat. First, she had teleported, then walked through a closed door, and now she held out one hand while eight mugs floated in front of her.

"Whoa!" said Ryan, staring. "How many superpowers _do_ you have?"

"Like, three," said Clara, "Rose has the incredible ability to change her eye colour at will."

"Shut up, Clara," said Rose.

"Ouch," said Clara, "You're in _my_ house." The American Doctor proceeded to pluck the hot mugs out of the air and hand them to everybody individually.

"Doctor-" Ryan began, eagerly addressing the Real Doctor.

"The answer's no," she said.

"I didn't even ask-"

"No, you're not taking the weird superpower drugs."

"Changed your tune about who gets to take the drugs," the American Doctor remarked. There was definitely some kind of atmosphere between them, the American Doctor keeping the Real one at arm's length, trying to appear aloof.

"What's that mean?" asked Mattie, taking her tea. The mug she took had zombies on the side.

"This Doctor is the one who drugged everybody on the TARDIS – except for me and Clara – and made them Manifests," said Rose.

"What? You _drugged_ my parents?" Mattie questioned.

"No – not – I – it wasn't-" the Real Doctor mumbled, "Clara helped me. My Clara. Before… forget about that."

"Right… well, I'm going back upstairs…" Mattie said, her demeanour towards them changing, "I was talking to Aki about _Stranger Things_ , so… you should put a plaster on your face." She left.

"You should," the American Doctor added to Clara, "I'll do it."

"I don't mean to be rude," began Graham, "But – why are all the wedding photos so different?"

"We've had six weddings," said Clara as the American Doctor looked through the first aid kit for a plaster.

"It's to compensate for the fact they were pissed and eloped for the first one, and neither of them can remember it," Rose said.

"I'll be the first to admit how unfortunate it was that I needed alcohol – which I normally avoid at all costs – to tell her how I feel," said the American Doctor, gently putting the plaster over the wound on Clara's face, just above her left cheekbone. "Could you imagine what might have happened if I never told her? What kind of miserable, old wretch I might have become?" An unusual pause spread throughout the room. "And what would have happened to Clara? She might have descended into a self-destructive spiral, tried to be a hero and made herself into a martyr. Only for those events to weigh on my conscience for who-knows-how-many years." These words were clearly being chosen deliberately, and the Real Doctor grew markedly uncomfortable, as well as irritated, but Yaz wasn't sure what to think. It was as though they were all speaking in riddles.

A knock sounded on the front door, loud and deliberate. Rather than get up to answer it, nobody in the living room moved. Clara checked her phone after the American Doctor lightly smoothed down the plaster with her thumb.

"Nobody's texted to say they're coming over," she said. Another knock.

"I know you're in, I can hear you all breathing," a voice shouted from outside, a woman. Rose's reaction was to roll her eyes and then return to the television. It appeared they recognised her.

"What do you want?" Clara asked.

"I need to use the TV," she shouted through the letterbox, pushing it open.

"Don't you have a TV in London?"

"I need the local news," the woman continued. Clara said nothing. "Come on, I won't stay."

"Door's unlocked."

"Ha, ha. Very funny. You have to invite me."

"Invite her? Who is that?" the Real Doctor whispered.

"Who've you got in there?" the woman asked, "I don't recognise the smells."

"You should stop smelling people, Sally," Rose said, "It's creepy."

" _Let me in_."

"If I let you in, will you shag me?" Clara continued. The American Doctor scoffed like she was used to this. Yaz was alarmed by the comment.

"No," said the woman – Sally?

"I suppose you're not coming in then, are you?" She kicked the door. "Bloody hell! Don't do that!"

"Just let her in," said Rose, "She's more annoying out there than she is in here."

"You can come in," the American Doctor gave up.

"Oi!" Clara hissed at her as the door was forced open, "She was definitely about to let me shag her." Yaz didn't understand it at all; Clara had a wife, so who was she trying to proposition?

"You've got no chance, mate," said Rose.

"Sally Sparrow!" the Real Doctor shouted.

"Person I've never met!" 'Sally Sparrow' copied her tone of surprise exactly, snatching the remote from Rose and standing in front of the TV to flick through the channels rapidly, much to Rose's ire.

"I take it back," grumbled Rose, "She's equally annoying no matter where she is."

"What's going on? Is this a party?" Sally looked around, then addressed Clara, "Have you two finally started swinging?"

"If we were, you and Esther would be top of our list," Clara jibed. Sally glared at her.

"Haven't you gotten sick of making that joke yet?"

"I'll stop if you sleep with me."

"And that one, too."

"I don't get it," the Real Doctor piped up, "How are you not… old? Do _none_ of you age?

"Shh, shh," Sally said, finally finding a local news station. Nothing of note was reported on, though, just the weather and a few cultural events which weren't very interesting. Sally Sparrow was disheartened by what she did, or didn't, find. "Have you heard about any murders recently? Nasty ones?"

"No," said Clara, "Why? Have you been killing people?"

"It's nothing to do with me, but there are these murders in London, and now there's one in Brighton, and the news hasn't reported on any of them."

"Then how would you know about it?"

"Saw it on Esther's computer while she was out." Esther the Lightning Girl, presumably. "Police have filed the reports, but they come back as suicides with no follow-up investigations. I've never known any suicide victim to rip out their own throats, though. She got a notification – which I saw, because she's away – like, forty-five minutes ago, about one being called in in Brighton. It's the same MO, as far as _I_ can see, and somebody's covering it up."

"So you think there's a vampire on the loose?" Cue panicked and horrified reactions from Yaz, Ryan, Graham _and_ the Real Doctor. Vampires!?

"There's no _way_ vampires are real," said Yaz.

"Case and point," said Clara, literally pointing at Sally, who stuck her tongue out in response. "Mature."

"A vampire!? How did that happen!?" the Real Doctor demanded of the American.

"Because-" Sally began, only for the American Doctor to immediately interrupt.

"She was attacked. In the street. What were we supposed to do? Execute her? She's never hurt anybody. Oswin manufactures cloned synthetic blood. No humans required. Sal – this is Old Twelvey's regeneration and her new companions. From the other universe. Don't scare them too much."

"Sorry," she said sarcastically, "Look, if you lot are interested, the body for this most recent murder is locked up in Brighton & Hove's police morgue, wherever that is. It's worth having a look at, to determine if it _is_ a vampire attack."

"Sally has a vested interest in preventing other, more violent vampires from wreaking chaos," the American Doctor continued, "Like… vampire police. Vampire _secret_ police, maybe."

"And it's just you? No other vampires?" the Real Doctor asked.

Sally met the American Doctor's eyes with an impossible to decipher expression, and then said, "Apparently." What on Earth did _that_ mean? They didn't have much time to wonder about what it meant, however, because a robotic voice began to address the American Doctor from an unseen place, which was certainly a cause for alarm.

" _Doctor, I have intercepted a phone call to the local police from a woman claiming to have seen a zombie in Brighton and Preston Cemetery_."

"Did you say 'zombie'?" the American Doctor exclaimed.

"Sorry, is that an AI? You have an AI in your house?" the Real Doctor interjected.

" _Negative, I am a virtual intelligence of Qatar origin, my name is Helix_ ," said the voice, " _Any indication of thought is an advanced illusion. Kill all humans_."

"Did it just say, 'kill all humans'?" Ryan asked.

"My sister programmes him, makes him say stuff like that," said Clara, "She has plenty of real AIs, though, if you want to talk to one of them."

"But Nios never answers her phone," said Sally.

"Shut up, shut up," the American Doctor shushed them, "Helix, did you say _zombie_?"

" _Affirmative, Doctor. This is the terminology the woman used. She reports witnessing a human being dig their way out of a grave_."

"Okay, and what do you mean when you say 'intercepted'? Did the police get the call at all?"

" _Negative, I posed as a dispatcher and advised the woman that the authorities were on their way and she should retreat to the nearest point of complete safety_ ," the robot, Helix, continued.

"Good. While I've got you, could you scrub all the CCTV footage around the Silver Room and erase anything that shows Clara in an altercation with a police officer? And if there's another girl in the footage, try to identify her, please and thanks."

" _Affirmative, Doctor. I will inform the necessary parties when the task is complete_."

"So," the American Doctor said after a moment, "Who wants to go to the police morgue to look at a vampire victim, and who wants to go to the cemetery to find a zombie?"

 **AN: Happy Pride month! And also it was my 21st birthday yesterday!**


	23. Double Blind - Chapter 3

_Double Blind_

 _3_

"Out you get," Clara said to her wife, the Alpha Doctor, and Graham in the seat next to her. She telekinetically opened the door and waited for them to leave, having just pulled up on the outskirts of the cemetery where the allegedly zombie-sighting had been reported.

"So cold," said the Doctor, shaking her head. The other five were all gathered in the back of the van, which Rose wasn't remotely happy about because the place had a distinct aura of sex. There was no surface in there she was willing to touch. Graham got out of the van while Clara and the Doctor continued their trademark bickering. Rose rolled her eyes, annoyed, and reached over to open the side doors to the vintage camper.

"Shouldn't we do something? They're getting a bit mean," said Ryan, glancing at them.

"Nah," said Sally.

"They're always like that," said Rose, then she whispered, "They get off on it."

"I heard that," Clara snapped from the front seat. Rose ignored her and climbed out into the warm, night air, Ryan following because nobody wanted to be around Clara and Thirteen when they were flirt-fighting. It was ironic that they almost never had _actual_ arguments, though Ryan's judgment was correct; they could certainly be quite mean. "Go on, get out of my sight. I have better things I could be looking at."

"Like what? Your own reflection?" asked the Doctor, making to leave. Rose waited outside for her, but just when it seemed she was finally going to leave she hesitated. "Just one more thing to say to you."

"What?" asked Clara. The Doctor returned to kiss her. Clearly on purpose, Sally made a conspicuous and very loud coughing noise. Clara stopped kissing the Doctor to glare at her.

"Just got something in my throat," she said.

"Homophobe," Clara accused.

"I didn't do anything," Sally lied. She had, and Rose thought it was quite funny. Clara turned her attention back to the Doctor, all of their insults now gone out of the window.

"Don't get eaten by any zombies, alright?"

"I'll try," she said, smiling. She kissed Clara once more and then _finally_ left her in peace, joining Rose, Ryan and Graham outside. "Have fun in the morgue, wifey!" she called after closing the door. Clara waved out of the window and then started the van again, driving off with Sally, Yaz and the Other Doctor in the back. Rose had to admit, the divisions in the group were mostly her own fault because she didn't want to go anywhere with Sally (and cemeteries had one too many religious symbols for a vampire to visit, ironically.) Neither Graham nor Ryan had wanted to visit a police morgue, and the Alpha Doctor was very eager about the possibility of zombies.

"I hope you two aren't giving Mattie warped ideas about what relationships are meant to be like," Rose remarked as the van drove off, the Doctor waving the other four away.

"What's the point of a having a significant other if you can't make fun of each other?" she asked, then held up her left hand, "The ring gives me that privilege. What's _your_ excuse?"

Rose shrugged, "It's funny." The Doctor shook her head.

"Whatever. Anyway. Graveyard. Zombies aren't gonna catch themselves," the Doctor indicated the large, gothic archways at the entrance to Brighton and Preston Cemetery. Salmon-coloured, intricately-carved terracotta with iron bars. There was a cottage sitting just behind it, but none of the lights were on. "D'you think anyone's home? This is when the vampire's useful, she'd be able to smell them."

"Yeah, she is bloody creepy," said Rose, "Just go knock on the door, like a normal person."

"A normal person hanging around a graveyard at this time of night?" the Doctor asked incredulously.

"It's worth a shot," said Graham, "Maybe there _is_ someone living there, they could be the one who called the plod, and now they're hiding from the zombie. If they're anything like those corpses we saw in Lancashire, I'd be boarding up the windows."

"Typical," said the Doctor, "Y'know, I remember a time when dead people stayed dead…" she sighed, "What the hell. What've I got to lose?" She walked up to the front door of the cottage, which had a signpost nearby explaining it was called the Lodge and was a historically important, listed building, and knocked loudly. She pressed her ear to the door to listen for signs of life, the other three hovering behind her. "I think I heard something. I'll tell them we're cops."

"Because _that's_ believable," muttered Rose, the Doctor pushing open the letterbox with her fingers and crouching down to look inside.

"Is there anybody in there? This is the police!" she shouted, "We got an emergency call."

"Maybe you should've done a different accent?" Ryan suggested, "Might confuse them."

"What? You think Americans can't emigrate? Not that I actually identify with being deemed 'an American', but y'know, I guess that's the way it goes. _Esse est percipi_."

"You're wearing trainers with the American flag on them," Ryan pointed out.

"And?" The door opened behind her before he could answer, and the Doctor automatically pulled out her psychic paper to present it to a very scared looking woman who looked to be in her forties, "Hi there, ma'am, I'm DS Oswald and this is my partner, uh, DC Tyler," she indicated Rose, "We got a call about… well, it's strange, to tell you the truth-"

"You're here about the zombie?" she asked.

"Was it you who called?" She nodded. "Great. Could you-"

"But – you're late," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"The police already came and took him."

"Well, that's funny," she said, faltering as she was caught in a lie, "We're the police."

"You don't really look like police."

"Detectives," Rose said, "Plain clothes. And you've just got to ignore the weird accent. Look, it's a Friday, and the full moon was last night; always brings the crazies out."

"Mm," the Doctor nodded, "It's hectic out there tonight. What can we say? Spend your whole night waiting for a cop, and then a dozen come along at once. Why don't you just tell us what you told the other guys, save us tracking them down when we get back to the station?"

"They didn't look like police either," she said.

"What'd they look like?" the Doctor asked, crossing her arms.

"Who are they?" she nodded at Ryan and Graham.

"There's nobody else there," Rose told her, her eyes flickering with a few strands of gold for a second. The woman in the door blinked, staring right at Ryan and Graham, then frowned.

"Of course. How silly of me… They were wearing black, they looked a bit like… SWAT team, maybe. Or… soldiers? I don't really know."

"Can I ask," Rose began, "What makes you think it was a zombie you saw and not just a drunk, or something? Halloween's next month, after all. Could be fancy dress."

"No," she said, "His eye was missing."

"People have missing parts," said the Doctor, "My sister-in-law only has one leg."

"You don't understand, he came right up here, he knocked on the door, just like you did, and I opened the door, and he was – he was _filthy_ , and rotting, I saw his intestines, and a gaping wound in his face. I shut the door and I called the police."

"What did he want? Did he attack you?" the Doctor asked.

"Well, no, he didn't do that, he was asking for help."

"And you called the cops?"

"They _are_ help – who was I supposed to call? Paramedics? Put him back in his grave?" she asked, "He was _dead_. And then he _wasn't_. And those men showed up, they grabbed him, and took him to a vehicle."

"Did you see it?"

"Not really, it's dark, and I'm not very good with cars."

"Was it a police car? Did you see the license plate?" the Doctor asked, "It's just, between you and I, I'm not sure those guys were cops." They couldn't be the police, because Helix had intercepted the phone call and stopped it getting to the police at all. So who were they, and what interest did they have in a 'zombie'?

"No," she said stiffly.

"Do you know who he was?" Rose began, "The zombie. If his grave is in here, and you live here."

"No. Can I go back inside? I'm packing to leave. I'm not being in a cemetery if there's a zombie outbreak. Anything can happen these days – after those trees, with these Manifests everywhere."

"Wait, you're gonna move? You mean… this house is gonna be, like, for sale? Just wondering – this building's super old, so you'd think it'd be pricey, but does it being a cemetery decrease the value?" the Doctor asked. The woman from the Lodge glared at her, then slammed the door in her face. "Can you believe that?"

"Why are you house hunting?" Rose asked.

"I'm not – but Clara would love to live in a creepy house like this," she said.

"I don't think Clara would want to move to a graveyard, actually," said Rose, pulling her away from the door by her elbow, "Come on."

"How did you do that? Make her not see us?" Ryan asked when they'd left the woman to her business, trying to flee a zombie outbreak the Doctor wasn't too convinced was actually happening. She suspected whatever happened was an isolated incident.

"Control the universe, mate," Rose explained, "People don't see things I don't want them to see."

"What's the plan, then? Who do we reckon took our zombie?" Graham asked, looking between them.

"Not sure," said the Doctor, feeling around in her pockets to try and find her sonic screwdriver, "But people don't just _come back to life_. There's always something to animate them. Whether it's vampirism, nanogenes, electricity, regeneration energy… _but_ … well…" But she lost her train of thought, getting distracted when she found her sonic and began scanning the air around them.

"Is that your sonic screwdriver?" Ryan asked, intrigued, "It's smaller than our Doctor's. And hers is yellow." _Hers_ was white and purple, but Clara had kept hold of the Eleventh Doctor's sonic all these years, though it hadn't ever really worked the same since spending two weeks underwater when the Doctor regenerated. Then again, neither had she.

"Strange… I'm getting some sort of signal. Didn't think I'd actually pick anything up, but there's something out here transmitting…" She held the screwdriver out like a dowsing rod until getting a bead on where they should be going, then headed out, making her way through the graves to find the source. "I'll tell you what's bugging me – she said he was still rotten, and he knocked on her door. So he's conscience, capable of rational thought, but he's falling apart."

"Maybe he's… healing?" Rose suggested, "When Esther came back to life, she was basically a zombie, I've heard her talk about it. All her fingernails fell off."

"That's true," said the Doctor thoughtfully, eyes fixed on where the sonic was pointing. "Doesn't happen with vampires. Means Sally's vampire theory might be bogus, which sucks because vampires are a pretty solid explanation."

"What does happen when someone turns into a vampire?" Ryan asked.

"Well, hm… It's like a regeneration – do you know regenerations?"

"A little, not much," said Graham.

"Well, they feel like you're burning from the inside-out, but it's quick. Vampires are genetically pretty similar to us – Time Lords, I mean. And they're just as good at healing, but they transform… slowly. And all the burning, the energy? Stays inside. It's like having a seizure that lasts for days, and the screaming… if somebody was buried out here and transforming into a vampire, you'd know, you'd be able to hear a mile away. And speaking of Esther, she's not supposed to exist, she's the result of an experiment with alien technology gone wrong. If there was Zuar technology out here, we would've detected it. And there haven't been any lightning storms recently."

"Maybe it's an alien?" Rose suggested, "There must be other aliens that can come back to life? He might not have been completely dead. Just resilient. Or like Jack?"

"Like _Jack_? Jack only exists because _you_ brought him back to life with your damn superpowers," the Doctor snapped, "Or is this your way of telling me you've been going around resurrecting people?"

"You can do that? Bring people back to life?" Ryan stared at Rose.

"Again, not sure you're getting the bit about me literally controlling the universe. Life, death, time, space, all at my disposal. Although, I don't actually mess with it, because… with great power, comes great responsibility. Said… who was it said that? Was it like, Churchill, or something?"

"It's what Uncle Ben says to Spider-Man," said the Doctor, pausing, holding the sonic up to her ear. She frowned. "Weird. It says we're right on top of – whoa!" She dropped out of sight. It took them a moment to realise she'd fallen right into an open grave.

"Doctor!?" Rose exclaimed, "Are you okay!?" They all went to crouch by the graveside. It was only then that Ryan really realised how short this Doctor was, when she was all the way down there picking herself up from the mud.

"Eurgh," she complained, "Now my jeans are dirty… typical…"

"Do cemeteries do this? Just leave graves open?" Rose asked.

"Not in my experience," said Graham, "Grave robbers, maybe."

"I'm willing to bet that this is where our zombie came from. Probably did that classic fist-through-the-dirt entrance, dug his way out," she said, "What's the name on the headstone?"

"Dexter Willard," said Rose, "Born 2040, died a few days ago. Birthday's in December, makes him twenty-three. Doesn't say on here how he died, or anything." The Doctor paused for a moment, thinking, then crouched down to search through the dirt with her hands. She didn't need to search for long. "Ah-ha!" She picked an object out of the muck, which had all caved in on the coffin below when Dexter Willard forced his way back into the land of the living. "It's an eyeball," she announced after wiping it on the sleeve of her pleather jacket.

"Sorry, did you say _eyeball_?" asked Graham.

"Yep," she held it up and it stared right at them. "Fake. But not glass. Metal, plastic. Weird. Cybernetic eyes aren't anywhere close to existing yet. Not that it really looks like a cybernetic one either, doesn't have anywhere to attach the nerves, it's just… round. And it's transmitting data."

"What kind of data?" Ryan asked.

"Vitals information, I think," she said, sonicking it, "Now that I'm holding it, it's detecting me. Two heartbeats, fifty-degree body temperature. Stick in someone's eye socket and I'm sure it's more than capable of letting you know if they've come back from the dead. Which explains how our boys in black knew exactly where to look…" She sonicked it again. "There. Turned it off."

"So it's like someone knew he was going to come back to life. Why bother burying him at all?"

"Yeah," the Doctor nodded, "That's what I'd like to know…"

* * *

The metallic sound of a late-night radio show echoed through the empty morgue, Stanley the medical examiner listening to the broadcast on his computer while he ate egg foo yung from the nearest (and coincidentally most unpleasant) takeaway. It was covered in salt and he ripped greasy, soggy pieces of it off with his fingers. The time neared midnight, but he was only halfway through his shift; he wasn't going to get any respite until five in the morning, stuck on the insufferable nightshift for his sins of not having a family to get home to – unlike the day crew. For whatever reason, though, poor Stanley was nearing on forty and was still chronically single and alone. It was this he thought about, bitterly, as he listened to a talk show about the best ways to attract women.

With no bodies appearing for almost an hour, it was almost at a point where Stanley was thinking of going out into Brighton and murdering somebody himself, just to have something to do, and was sure he knew more than enough about forensics to cover up the crime – he was a doctor, after all. But the backdoors of the mortuary crashed open and he nearly dropped his cardboard container of Chinese takeaway on the floor in alarm. Nobody had paged ahead to say there was a body being brought in, and he was alarmed to see a woman he did not recognise wheeling a body bag on a stretcher.

"Got a live one for you!" the buoyant, blonde woman announced loudly, speaking in a strong, northern accent. Stanley carefully left his egg foo yung where it wouldn't come to any ill-harm and got up from his desk. "Although, not live, obviously, since it's a cadaver."

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Me? I'm new," she said, "On transfer while the usual bloke – oh, what's his name?"

"Vince?"

"Yes," she nodded, "Vince. While he's away."

"He didn't tell me he was going away."

"Came up suddenly," she said, "Family stuff."

"Vince doesn't have any family," said Stanley.

"Well, no, that's the thing, he found out he does, a long-lost daughter."

"But he's infertile, has been since he had that accident when he was thirteen."

"Just made it even more urgent," the woman continued to quickly rebuff him, "Basically a miracle. Or she could be scamming him, who's to say? The point is, I'm here to deliver a body. Murdered. Nasty MO."

"Oh, really?" asked Stanley suspiciously, eyeing the zipped-up, black bag. The woman nodded. He did not believe that she was any kind of medical worker who was supposed to be there. He wiped his greasy hands on the bloody pockets of his lab coat but kept a safe distance.

"What're you listening to?" she asked him, beaming.

"What?"

"Sounds like pick-up techniques," she said. Horrified, he realised he hadn't had a chance to mute the computer. He lunged back for the keyboard and managed to close the browser during a bit on negging he'd actually been meaning to take notes on. "Have you tried being friendly and approachable?"

"Look, I don't believe you're meant to be here," he said firmly.

"Why not!?" she exclaimed, "Because I'm not as fun as Vince? Is that it?" He stared at her. "I've got ID!" She drew a battered, leather wallet out of her pocket, and presented him with an ID that identified her as a coroner who worked at some hospital just outside of Huddersfield normally. "I'm just on loan. But, it's your morgue, I wouldn't want to step on anyone's toes when it comes to the autopsy. This is a body that needs a good autopsy-ing."

"What?" he frowned at her.

"That's your job, isn't it? This is a murder victim," she said, "Barely been dead half an hour! Personally, I'm shocked. Never thought I'd see a crime this violent in Brighton, of all the places. I'm supposed to be on holiday, can you believe it!?" He didn't say anything. "What's your name?"

"Stan."

"Great name, Stan. Always liked it. Seen any nasty murders, recently? I was thinking of moving here, putting in a transfer to come to the police morgue – and especially if our Vince ends up moving to Manchester with his long-lost daughter – but if there have been any more even _remotely_ violent incidents, I'll have to go somewhere else." Stan did not want this _woman_ joining him in the morgue, he didn't care how qualified she was.

"There was one earlier tonight, actually," he said, "Just a few hours ago. A man was gutted, had his innards pulled out with industrial tools, got dumped on a lay-by north of Hove."

"Anything weird about him?" she asked.

"Apart from him being killed with specialised instruments you'd normally find in a butcher's?"

"What did he die of? Specifically?"

"Uh…"

"Is the body still here?"

"Well, yes, it needs to be held while they carry on the investigation. The next of kin haven't even been notified." She nodded, crossing her arms in thought. "Maybe you should go, leave this one with me."

"Wonder if it's the same MO…" she mused, "Here, take a look," she reached over to unzip the body bag, not even putting on a pair of gloves. To Stanley's shock, the body she revealed did not look gruesome at all. He found himself presented with an ethereally beautiful corpse, with long, dark blonde hair but an unmistakable hue of death.

"I thought you said it was violent?"

"Well, maybe I was exaggerating. Don't get as many murders in the village I work in," she said, Stanley inching closer, "In Skelmanthorpe."

"Doesn't sound like a real place."

"Funny, that," she said, smiling at him, "What do you make of this corpse, then?"

"Uh… doesn't look fresh, looks like it's been dead for… hmm… I can't really say," he touched the arm of the dead women to check the temperature, "Did you say she was killed in the last half hour?"

"That's what they tell me. The witnesses. To the crime. Which definitely happened."

"This body looks like it's in a state of arrested decomposition like it's been dead for much longer, but something's stopping it from-"

It was the biggest fright that Stanley had ever suffered in his life. He was not a fan of horror or scares in any form, which many people said was ironic given his profession, but in his line of work, dead bodies did not have a tendency to move. They also did not have a tendency to suddenly snap bolt-upright with black eyes and long teeth and shout, "BOO!" in his face. He screamed himself, his eyes rolled back into his head, and within a matter of seconds he had collapsed in a faint on the floor, completely unconscious.

Sally Sparrow and the new, alternate Doctor glanced over the side of the fold-out trolley they'd found outside at the ME.

"I think you scared him," said the Doctor.

"I cannot believe that worked," Sally shook her head, wiping the greasy fingerprints from her upper-arm where Stanley the creep had touched her.

"Why not? You're a convincing dead body."

"And you're _not_ a convincing coroner," Sally said, unzipping the rest of the body bag they'd also found (alright, maybe they'd had Clara use her 'Phantom' powers to steal some equipment from the corner's transport van parked outside) and getting down from the gurney. "'Skelmanthorpe'? What kind of ridiculous name is that?"

"It's a real place! _You're_ the one who said 'boo'."

"What do you expect me to say!?"

"That you're going to drain him of blood?"

"Well, I'm not," she said. Following the commotion, Clara and Yaz entered through the same back-door the two of them had just come through, the entrance specifically for fresh corpses – or, not-so-fresh corpses, in Sally's case.

"You can drain me of blood if you like?" offered Clara.

"Thanks, but I'm fine for now," said Sally dryly.

"You have a wife," Yaz reminded Clara, which amused Sally, who was more than used to Clara's flirting by now and fully aware that nothing in the universe would get Clara to betray the Doctor.

"I know," said Clara, shrugging, "She won't mind. Ooh, did he have Chinese?" Clara's attention, which had been absorbed by Sally just moments ago, now instantly switched as she made a beeline for Stanley the ME's half-eaten, damp container of egg foo yung.

"You're not gonna eat that, are you?" asked Yaz in horror.

"Well, he's not going to, is he?" said Clara, eating the thick omelette with her hands just like Stanley had been doing, "This is great," she said with her mouth full.

"You don't even know where his hands have been, his coat's covered in blood," Yaz pointed out, "That can't be hygienic. There might be bits of dead people in there." Clara was utterly indifferent.

"Back to business!" the Doctor announced while Clara continued to eat unconscious Stanley's dinner, "He said the body from the murder earlier tonight is still here, we just need to find it." Yaz was still staring at Clara.

"Do you want a bit?" Clara offered.

"I do not," she said, affronted.

"You'll get used to her," Sally advised Yaz.

"Don't know the name of this murder victim, do you?" the Doctor asked Sally.

"No, not sure he's been formally identified. Whatshisface said they haven't notified the next of kin," she indicated Stanley on the floor.

"I'll check the computer," said Clara. The keyboard was disgusting, shining with grease from Stanley's fingers. Again, though, Clara didn't care.

"And you married her," Yaz said quietly to the Doctor, indicating Clara.

"Shocking, isn't it?" Sally remarked, "She's also a poet if you can believe it, and she has two master's degrees."

"Really?" Yaz, plainly, could not believe it. She couldn't lie, though; the enigma of the Doctor's wife was confounding her. Now that she'd gotten over the initial hurdle of the very idea that the Doctor would get married to anybody, she was finally trying to understand Clara herself. Clara who, on the one hand, was a smoker, chronically flirted with everybody around her, and was eating somebody else's lukewarm, leftover omelette with her fingers; but on the other hand, had stepped in to defend a girl she'd never met to a corrupt police officer, taking a nasty blow to the head, and who apparently wrote poetry, played the piano, and was highly educated.

"This guy has so much porn open," Clara interrupted to say, "Like, more porn than I've got open most of the time." Yaz found herself even more confused – _why_ did she have lots of porn open?

"Might've been watching it while he eats that omelette," Sally said. Clara either did not hear this or did not care in the slightest. "He was listening to a podcast about negging."

Clara laughed, "Negging doesn't even work."

"And what would you advise?" Sally asked, examining the morgue freezer doors for any sign of who was being kept inside. But the exteriors only had codes written on them which didn't mean anything to anyone except Stanley. "Get them drunk and manipulate their low self-esteem?"

"…No," said Clara unconvincingly, "Don't start this, you sound like Vastra. And the last time I saw her she called me a womaniser, but, like, in a negative way."

"Is there a positive way to be called a womaniser?" asked Sally.

"You should be nicer to me; I'm one of the few people who actually _likes_ hanging out with you and doesn't view it as a chore."

"I'm just trying to help Yaz get a handle on what sort of person you are," said Sally, "You're clearly confusing her by being simultaneously endearing _and_ repugnant."

"'Endearing'? I'm swooning," she said, focusing on the computer. Then she brought something up and laughed, "Come look at this." They left their examination of the morgue to go see what Clara had found. It was the morgue CCTV camera a few minutes ago, the Doctor wheeling in the body bag. After some soundless conversation, the body bag tore itself open and Stanley fainted at the sight of thin air. Sally scoffed.

"Very funny," she said.

"You really don't show up on camera!?" Yaz exclaimed, "Sorry – I don't understand how this vampire thing works. How can you _not_ show up on camera?"

"Oswin says it's because light doesn't reflect off them, it goes through them," Clara said, "Which is apparently uncomfortable, and means they have terrible eyesight and are sort of hard to see. Have you noticed you have to squint a bit to get a look at her?" Now that Yaz thought about it, it did often seem like Sally Sparrow existed just on the periphery of her line of sight. "And she doesn't have a shadow." Yaz hadn't noticed that at all but now saw in the harsh lights of the morgue that Sally Sparrow was not casting a shadow at all.

"Who's Oswin, again?" Yaz asked, unsure if she'd ever had an explanation of that name. They talked about so many people between each other, and she didn't know any of them. Clara was still messing around with the footage on the computer.

"My sister, to whom I shall now send this video before I erase it," said Clara.

"And what is she? A vampire expert?"

"A genius," said Clara, " _The_ genius, she's the smartest person in human history. But she doesn't really leave the TARDIS."

"Enough about how much you fancy yourself," said Sally, "Did you find out which body we're looking for?"

"Oh – the John Doe in freezer number five, I think," Clara said, "He's the only John Doe they've still got here, and you said he hadn't been identified. There's only two other bodies in here right now, and they're both women. Three if we count you." Upon hearing this, the Doctor, Yaz in tow, made a beeline for the freezer, while Sally loitered next to Clara and watched her delete the footage of them.

"So we're not telling her about Ravenwood?" Sally asked very quietly.

"No," Clara hissed, "That's a secret. For her own protection, because of some stupid prophecy in their universe."

"Well, if you want my advice, stop talking about vampires _plural_ ," Sally advised.

"Here we go!" the Doctor said loudly, pulling open the freezer door. A cloud of cold air floated out of it as she wheeled out the slab, upon which lay a messy, mangled body. Sally and Clara left the computer to join them.

It certainly had been a violent crime, deep gashes made across his guts and chest, his face frozen in an expression of horror. He had nasty scratches around one of his eye sockets and his right leg was broken in multiple places. There was no doubt about it being a murder. "So, Stanley said he was murdered with tools you'd find in a butcher's shop."

"Serial killing butcher," said Clara, fumbling in her pockets for a moment, leaving the container of egg foo yung floating telekinetically in the air in front of her. She pulled out her pack of cigarettes.

"What are you doing? You can't smoke in here," said Sally.

"Why not?"

"Because it's a morgue!"

"Yes, and? Everybody here is already dead."

"There's no ventilation, we'll all have to smell it," Sally continued to argue with her, "It stinks. _You_ stink, right now." Clara rolled her eyes.

"Christ, fine… if you're going to be a _buzzkill_ …" Sally shook her head as Clara plucked the container out of the air again. Yaz and the Doctor exchanged a look; they were both glad that she hadn't lit a cigarette in there, because Sally was right, the ventilation really wasn't great.

Once she was satisfied Clara was going to behave, Sally leant down closer to the body to get a good look at the injuries. "This wasn't vampires," she ruled, "No teeth marks, and the wounds are too deep – they'd bleed too much."

"Is there such a thing as too much blood when you're a vampire?" asked Yaz sceptically.

"Killing someone like _this_ for food is about equivalent to if every time you had a meal you threw half of it on the ground for no reason," said Sally, which made sense, in all fairness. And none of his wounds did look like bite marks. "Vampires would want as much blood as possible from a victim, and this isn't the way to get that."

"What about the other MOs? Are they similar?" the Doctor asked.

"I don't really know, they're violent murders that never get investigated by the police, like somebody's covering them up," she said. Hearing that, Yaz took the papers from the plastic folder stuck to the front of the freezer door. In there was the medical report. She skimmed the information, the Doctor leaning over her shoulder to read. Clara, unfazed by the dead body, just kept eating, while Sally pored over the corpse looking for any missed detail.

"The medical report says this was an accidental death," said Yaz.

"How weird," said the Doctor, "And I'll bet our Stan's no mastermind. How much of the CCTV did you erase?"

"Only the bit where Sally goes ghost," said Clara.

"'Goes ghost'?" asked Yaz.

"Sorry, it's my wife," said Clara, "She watches a _lot_ of cartoons, usually when I'm trying to sleep." Yaz shook her head and returned to the medical report.

"What's the time of death?" the Doctor asked.

"About eight o'clock today, the same time we ran into each other," said Yaz.

"Can you look at the cameras again?" she asked Clara, "See if anybody paid Stan a visit about the time this body arrived, maybe persuaded him to write something else on the autopsy report."

"I suppose," said Clara, walking off, "Though, there's every possibility that he's a shit coroner. Couldn't tell a vampire when he saw one." He was still passed out on the floor nearby.

"Is there a toxicology report in there?" Sally asked Yaz, who flipped through the pages.

"Uh… yeah, blood work all came back clean, nothing out of the ordinary." For some reason, Sally was perplexed by this, and stood up straight, crossing her arms and thinking.

"There's a void in the footage," said Clara, "Identical to the one _I_ just made when I deleted that bit of you and Sally just now. Somebody else has been messing with the cameras."

"So there was somebody here," said the Doctor, "Someone really _is_ covering these murders up, they must have shown up and asked Stan to lie on this death certificate. But if somebody's doing that, how did you find out the crimes in London were also murders, with the same MO?"

"I told you, Esther's computer," said Sally, going back towards Clara, "They're reported as murders by the police dispatchers, but then they just vanish, no reported murders outside of the 999 calls and first responders. First responders who don't have any statements on record, either."

"Maybe we should've talked to Stan a bit more," said the Doctor, eyeing Stan as he lay in a heap on the floor. Sally stepped around him and crouched down next to Clara so that she could access a small fridge under the desk. This fridge had a biohazard sign on its door and contained about half a dozen blood vials. She pulled out the tray and examined the labels on them until finding the one belonging to John Doe in the fifth freezer.

"They're going to notice if you steal their blood samples," Clara warned her.

"What are you doing with the blood?" Yaz asked. Sally bit down on the cork plugging the vial and pulled it out with her teeth, "Wait – you're not gonna drink it are-? And you did drink it. Actual, human blood." Sally coughed.

"Again – you seem to keep forgetting about the vampire thing," she said, but she didn't look happy about what she'd just drank, "And _he's_ not a human, he's a Manifest. Blood tastes different. Shit…" She paused and put a hand to her head, making a pained expression.

"Are you okay!?" Clara asked urgently. She didn't reply. "Sally!?"

"Yeah, sorry," she said eventually, "Got brain freeze."

"Oh, for-"

"What!? It's cold, it's been in a fridge. Look, if he's a Manifest, that would show up in the blood work, so either he's lying _again_ or the blood hasn't been tested at all, because they'd put that on the medical report. Manifests are supposed to be clearly identifiable; they even have different driver's licenses."

"And they _don't_ have basic human rights," Clara muttered. Yaz believed that, after seeing a girl get attacked for being a Manifest by a police officer earlier, and then an entire illegal bar dedicated to serving ostracised, Manifest patrons.

"So now a Manifest has been violently murdered, and it's being covered up," said Yaz, "What if the other victims were Manifests, too?"

"Hold on…" the Doctor interrupted, squinting at the body. She reached into her coat and removed her sonic screwdriver, which took both Sally and Clara by surprise.

" _What_ is that?" Clara asked in shock.

"It's just… sonic screwdriver," said the Doctor unsurely, "You have sonic screwdrivers in this universe, don't you?" Clara mirrored her and also took a screwdriver out of her pocket, only Clara's was silver and gold and looked like a green-lighted claw when extended.

"Yeah, only they usually don't look like big, yellow dildos," said Clara. The Doctor was aghast, but Yaz snickered – it sort of _did_ look like that.

"Yaz!" the Doctor protested. "Don't make fun of my screwdriver! I love my screwdriver!"

"I bet you do," said Clara, "Looks very adequate when it comes to screwing."

" _You_ are unbelievable," the Doctor snapped at her, "And why do you have that old thing?"

Clara paused before answering, "Reminds me of my husband. I kept it. My wife has a new one, it's white with a purple light, looks a bit like Jenny's. Anyway, I have a _lot_ of dildos, and most of them look like that." She put her own screwdriver away.

"Are you done now?"

"I suppose."

"Good. Stay over there."

"You sound like my wife when you tell me off," Clara quipped, which only annoyed the Doctor even more, though Clara had obviously said it on purpose. The Doctor very self-consciously went about scanning the dead body on the slab.

"What's the verdict? Is he gonna make it?" Sally asked. The Doctor ignored her and then held the screwdriver up to her ear, listening to it.

"Can't be right…" she muttered. She leant over the body to look at his face, and then – to Yaz's displeasure – reached over and pulled open one of his eyelids. The eye that had the scratches around it. "These scratches look post-mortem, very little blood. And this eye, it's… it's…"

"No, Doctor, don't do-" But Yaz's warning was futile. Of course, the Doctor _did_ dig her fingers into the corpse's eye socket to pull out his _actual eyeball_. She'd seen a lot of things during her time as a trainee PC but had yet to see somebody pull an eye out of a skull.

"Wait, but that's-" Clara began.

"Definitely _not_ a human eye," said the Doctor, "It's a device of some kind." She turned it over, realising it was only half-painted to look like an eye. "Someone took out his eye and stuck this in there _after_ he was dead. My money's on Stan the man." Again, she scanned it with the screwdriver, the other three waiting intently to see what she could find out.

"Well?" Yaz prompted, "What is it? What's it for?"

"It's sending out a signal. It's some sort of vitals monitor, as best as I can tell. Why would you want to monitor the vitals of a dead person, though? Unless you thought he wasn't gonna stay dead."

"He smells dead," said Sally, "It would make sense if it was vampires attacking and turning people, but there's no way this is them. If he was changing…"

"What?" asked Yaz, "What happens when you change?"

"I just remember pain," she said.

"It's not very nice," Clara added quietly, "Lots of screaming and writhing. Lasts a few days. You should probably turn it off, god knows what kind of information it might start sending about you; dead body's suddenly grown another heart and been set on fire."

"Fair point," she said, sonicking it. "So the question is, who changed those records, and why are they apparently waiting for a dead body to come back to life?"


	24. Double Blind - Chapter 4

_Double Blind_

 _4_

The house the Doctor lived in was, despite the very idea of the Doctor having any sliver of permanence being incomprehensible, exactly the kind of building Yaz had come to expect. While it couldn't travel through time and space – that she knew of – she was comforted some when they were taken into a room on the first floor, a door with a biometric lock that led into a well-protected but wondrous room. She was struck with the same sense of awe as entering the TARDIS for the first time, and it was appropriately bigger on the inside. For a brief moment, she thought the entire left-hand wall was a window out to the night, and it took her a moment to realise that what she was actually looking at was a vast screen from the distant future showing far-away galaxies, twinkling stars and black holes. It was also laid out like a duplex, with an additional top floor built like an extended balcony above them, a spiral staircase leading up to the second level. The walls were lined with bookshelves carrying tomes even more ancient and mysterious than the ones in the rest of the house, and there were tables and workbenches covered in gadgets and machinery. A futuristic grand piano, with strange, smooth designs and a shining veneer was off to one side, an antique phonograph sitting on a table next to it offering an odd contrast; along with these, a red electric guitar was leaning against the piano, but Yaz didn't know enough about musical instruments to identify it. A pair of large, fancy armchairs was nestled in one corner with a small, circular table between them covered in coffee rings and a worn-down copy of _Les Misérables_ , and then, on the far side of the room-

"Is that a trampoline!?" Ryan exclaimed. It _was_ a trampoline, and it was taking up quite a lot of the room, which was a little smaller than a standard school assembly hall.

"I wouldn't use it," Clara warned him, "It's right under the balcony. _Somebody_ banged their head on it last week."

"Yeah, okay," said the American Doctor, irked, as the eight of them filed into the room.

"Why put it there?" Ryan asked.

"There's nowhere else," said the American Doctor.

"Could get rid of it," said Clara, "Throw it out." The Doctor glared at her. It seemed like the trampoline was a point of contention.

" _It was a good deal_." Clara shook her head and crossed her arms, obviously very annoyed about the trampoline's presence.

"Right, then," the British Doctor put her hands together, beckoning for them all to huddle together around her, "What do we know? Let's compile our knowledge. Hit me with some facts." The American remained unimpressed by her counterpart. Ryan thought she was a lot more easy-going without another Doctor there but fell into a sulk whenever she was around her other self.

"Well, the John Doe in the morgue and this zombie were obviously both visited by the same people," said Sally, "Since we have two of these weird eyes."

"Yeah," said Rose, "And the woman in the house said she could see this Dexter Willard's innards, and stuff, so he must have died violently too. You can't rot that much in a few days."

"We also know that the John Doe was a Manifest, but the medical examiner lied about it in the autopsy report," added Clara.

"And that somebody paid him off and probably other members of the police, too," said Yaz.

"Not to mention a couple of men in black pretending to be coppers just to kidnap the zombie from the graveyard," said Graham.

"And it was like they were expecting people to come back to life," Ryan finished, "Or at least hoping for it."

"Good info dump," the British Doctor gave them a thumbs up. "So our next step is finding out where these eyes came from. We do that, and maybe we can find where Dexter was taken."

"Someone should look at the other murders, too," said the American Doctor, "See if any of the other victims were Manifests."

"I wouldn't count on finding much," said Sally, "As Yaz said, someone's paying off the police, bribing them to keep quiet. These deaths aren't being logged properly. The crime scene reports say there was a violent murder, then the pathologist comes back and says it was just a heart attack or a suicide. But who would rip out their own intestines?"

"Well, maybe some of them were officially documented, I know there's a database," said the American Doctor, "The victims have to have _something_ in common, a reason why they're being killed."

"As far as I know, none of the others have risen from the grave," said Sally, "And I was looking for that sort of thing since this has so much in common with rogue vampire attacks."

"I'm gonna make some more tea, then," Clara decided.

"Bring the computers in while you're at it," the American Doctor told her, then stopped to think, "You know, actually, I'll come with you."

"I can carry the tea by myself," Clara said.

"I _know_ , I just…" she paused, everybody waiting for what she was going to say. She clearly didn't like the scrutiny, though. "…Here, take both eyes, there should be enough stuff over there," she gave her eyeball to the British Doctor and indicated the mess of machinery, leaving the group to follow Clara after she detached herself from them. Clara held the door open for her, pleasantly surprised, but neither of them said a word until it shut behind them.

"You okay?" Clara asked. She didn't say anything. "Sweetheart?"

"I don't know. I'm tired."

Clara paused, then held out her hand, "We'll talk downstairs. It's gonna take a while to make all this tea." The Doctor took it and let Clara gently pull her away from the landing, downstairs, where they might be able to get some peace and quiet. "To think, we were gonna go to the cinema tonight, and then spend the rest of the evening in bed," she whispered.

"You don't think we have time to slip away for a moment, do you?"

"Not without everybody knowing what we're up to."

"But it's our house."

Clara laughed a little as they went into the kitchen. Helix automatically turned the lights on and off for them in every room of the house, which was often the only thing the VI got used for – that and operating the burglar alarm. She dropped the Doctor's hand when she went to fill the kettle.

"God, this is like when the Dimension Crash first happened; us, lurking in a kitchen, making tea for everybody," said Clara.

"You're just really good at making tea," said the Doctor. Clara turned to look at her. "What? Did that sound sarcastic? Honestly – it's really good tea. And you do those lattes with the little hearts in them, it's the sweetest thing in the whole universe." Clara smiled.

" _You're_ the sweetest thing in the whole universe."

"A _compliment_. You must be worried about me."

"Hey, could you do something for me while we're here?"

"What?"

"Could you make me some toast?" she asked, dishing out teabags into the same eight mugs they'd used earlier; Clara had rinsed them all before they'd left, to stop the milk congealing in the bottom.

"…Okay, but you have to eat it before we go back upstairs, otherwise, everybody else'll want some. You know how humans get with toast. And we don't have enough bread."

"Thanks. I love you."

She laughed, "What's that in aid of?"

"In aid of me loving you. Obviously."

"Uh-huh. I'm not made of glass, Coo," she dropped two slices of bread in the toaster and went to get margarine out of the fridge.

"…What do you think of her, then?" Clara asked carefully.

"What do _you_ think of her?"

"She's a lot better than the last one. Nicer, happier. Female-er. Blonder," said Clara.

"Always with the blondes…"

"She _is_ nice. You don't _have_ to dislike her, you know," Clara pointed out.

"I don't wanna talk about this now."

"Then why did you follow me downstairs?"

"Because I'm stressed out, and being around you calms me down," she said, crossing her arms, irritated – but it was herself she was irritated at. "So could we just talk about… something – _anything_ – else? I mean – how's your head, first of all?"

"Sore. Hope I'm not concussed, I shouldn't have been driving if I am," she said, "Do we have any painkillers?"

"I'll grab them for you," she said. While Clara tried to remember how many sugars everybody took she heard the Doctor rifle through the cupboards. A few seconds later Clara felt a pair of warm arms wrap around her waist, "I forgot to tell you how brave you were standing up to that dirty cop earlier."

Clara smiled when the Doctor kissed her cheek, "How brave I was? Do I get a sticker? Like when children get jabs?"

"Do you want a sticker?"

"Well, I wouldn't say _no_ to a sticker," said Clara, leaning around so she could meet the Doctor's eyes, "Do you still have that sticker maker?"

"No, Sally broke it years ago," she said.

"I'll have another kiss in lieu of a sticker, I suppose," Clara said, leaning towards her. The Doctor was more than happy to oblige, at which point the toast finished and shot up out of the machine.

"Here you go," the Doctor held up a packet of paracetamol after letting her go.

"Urgh, you're a dream. And now you're making me toast."

"Well, you're making me tea."

She lowered her voice, "Maybe we should sneak away for a few minutes. Say there was an emergency, with the neighbours."

"What kind of emergency?"

"The neighbours really wanted us to shag." They were startled when someone knocked on the kitchen doorframe behind them, just as the kettle finished boiling and the Doctor was midway through buttering Clara's toast. It was the _other_ Doctor, come downstairs. Already she was looking sheepish about what she'd just overheard.

"Aren't you meant to be looking into those eyeballs?" Clara's Doctor asked, her frosty demeanour returning. She did not like other Doctors, not any of them; the only one she'd ever been able to abide since regenerating was Tentoo.

"Set your robot off doing it. Thought I'd come and ask you some questions."

"Like what?" asked Clara, pouring the tea into the row of mugs.

"What happened to your arm?" The jovial, upbeat Doctor had suddenly turned stern and serious, scrutinising the pair of them from the doorway of their own home.

"The burn? That was a long time ago."

"I thought you're supposed to heal."

"I'm not going to tell you what happened," Clara said coolly, "You don't need to know."

"Fine. What about Clara? Have you seen her?"

"I'm right here," said Clara.

"When I regenerated, I got my memories of her back, the memories that were erased for… the good of the universe, or something. I know she must be out there somewhere, she's not dead – well, not _dead_ dead – and I know _you_ have a complex about your Echoes," she indicated Clara, who set the kettle down and crossed her arms.

"She's not one of my Echoes, and I haven't seen her since the last time I saw you. What happened to her?" Clara Ravenwood was very much not ' _dead_ dead', she was off gallivanting in their TARDIS with Jenny, but she'd never been able to recover the memories of her own death or the interim period between dying with the Doctor and waking up as a vampire strapped down to a chair. Ashildr had never quite filled in all the details.

"Sacrificed herself to save somebody else's life," said the other Doctor. "Is that what happened to your arm?"

"No. Someone hurt my Echoes, and I was going to hurt them, and Esther stopped me. And now I keep it to remind me to look after them. So fine, you're right, I have a complex, but that doesn't make Beta Clara _my_ responsibility," said Clara, "I suppose if we do run into her, we could pass along a message? Tell her you still fancy her?"

"You've never met anyone called Ashildr, have you?" she ignored that remark.

"No," said Clara's Doctor, "I can't say we have. Are you done interviewing us now?"

She broke into a smile again, "I suppose so. Have you got any biccies?" The Doctor handed Clara a slice of toast, keeping the other for herself.

"No, we were meant to go shopping tomorrow. Matilda's always nicking them and taking them up to her room," said Clara. She wasn't convinced that this new Doctor has ceased being suspicious of them, though.

"What about toast? Could I have some-"

"No more bread."

"Like I said," Clara added, "Shopping tomorrow."

She nodded slowly, thinking, "You know, I'm getting a bit tired of this 'Alpha Universe' 'Beta Universe' thing. We should come up with some better names, don't you think?"

"What? For all of them? There's a lot," said Clara.

"No! For ours. This 'Alpha Doctor,' 'Beta Doctor,' thing is just… old."

"Just because _I'm_ the Alpha Doctor…"

"Alright, sweetheart, maybe she has a point. They have always been shit names," Clara ate her toast. The mugs were stewing.

"Shall I put the milk in those?" the 'Beta' Doctor indicated the mugs behind Clara.

"Oh, sure, go ahead," she stepped aside to stand next to her wife, lingering.

"What about Red-Verse and Blue-Verse?" the 'Alpha' Doctor suggested, "Diamond-Verse and Pearl-Verse? Sun-Verse and Moon-Verse?"

"These are just _Pokémon_ games," said Clara.

"Sword-Verse and Shield-Verse."

"Still _Pokémon_."

"Coke-Verse and Pepsi-Verse."

"But you hate capitalism," Clara pointed out.

"Well – you suggest something then! You're the one who came up with 'the Unnameable' after all."

"The _Unnameable_? What's that?" asked the other Doctor, still pouring the milk.

"The universe where all of the Lovecraftian elder gods live," Clara explained, "You want to avoid it. We were there a few months ago because one of them kidnapped Jack and Rose."

"But it's cool," the Doctor resumed, "She's my friend on MSN now. The god. God-thing. She's called Angie, she's the size of a football stadium made of eyes. But you know the worst thing about her? She watches _Home and Away_. I say watches, she's blind."

"But you just said she's made out of eyes."

"I know. That's irony for you."

"What about," Clara began, "We do a hilarious play on your raging communism and atomic age… thing… and have the Cosmic-Verse and the Astro-Verse. Y'know, like astronauts and cosmonauts."

Finishing her toast, the Alpha Doctor clapped her hands loudly, "You see!? _This_ is why I love this woman. She's a genius. I'm more than happy to be the Cosmic Doctor from this moment forward."

"If only they had _Pokémon Communism_ and _Capitalism_ for you to enjoy," Clara quipped.

"Implies they're both equally valid world-views. Which they aren't. The left will win, Coo," said the Doctor.

"Cute," said Clara.

"Yes, thank you, I'm aware that I'm cute." Clara laughed.

"Right, I think I'm done with this tea," the newly-christened 'Astro Doctor' said, eyeing up the mugs after fishing out the teabags. She was clearly dying to escape before she had to listen to them continue to flirt.

"Do you want a tray so you can take them up? While we finish our toast?" Clara asked, purposely eating her singular slice of toast as slowly as possible with the aim of securing more alone time with her wife. As soon as she said that, the 'Cosmic Doctor' turned to open one of the lower cupboards and retrieve a metal tray.

"Sure. Oh, one more question – Sally Sparrow."

"Yes, she _is_ very attractive," said Clara.

"Not my question. She's a vampire. And you're just fine with that? The last time I checked, Time Lords weren't _really_ supposed to let the Great Vampires go around breeding."

"Well, y'know," said the Doctor, holding out the tray to her other self (Clara knew that her own Doctor also wasn't keen on the vampires multiplying), "Much as I don't like it, she's never killed or even attacked anybody. The blood Oswin clones has always been enough. Besides, if she hasn't bitten Clara yet, I doubt she's going to bite _anybody_."

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Clara.

"Just that you throw yourself at her at every opportunity."

Clara paused for a moment, narrowed her eyes, thinking, then sighed, "I suppose I do do that, to be fair."

"If she can resist such easy prey, she can resist anybody," the Doctor shrugged while the 'Astro Doctor' loaded up her tea tray, taking the tea responsibility away from Clara for once.

"Are you trying to imply that I'm easy?" Clara asked.

"You are literally the easiest person I've ever met. You spend as much time screwing yourself as you do letting me have the privilege."

"Leaving now," the other Doctor announced while Clara pretended to be offended by an entirely correct statement.

"Mind the shoes on the stairs," Clara warned, "In case you trip." She disappeared around the corner and into the hall. "So. How long can we stay down here until that lot up there start thinking we're arseholes?"

"I think she's onto us," the Doctor lowered her voice, taking another bite of toast. "About Ravenwood. And she's right – it _was_ you who convinced Oswin to resurrect her with nanogenes."

"Yes, alright, I know, I remember," said Clara, shaking her head, "But what are we supposed to do? You remember the reason she had to abandon her profession, change her name, move to Hollowmire – because of whatever bullshit was going on in their universe. The 'hybrid', or whatever it is Ashildr and Missy have talked about."

"I've never understood that stupid legend. Why is it dangerous for them to travel together but not for us to be _married_ to each other? We don't pose a threat to the greater universe, do we?"

"Quite hard to threaten anything when we've spent most of our time together in bed," she shrugged. "And isn't it just a prophecy? What does it actually say?"

"It says a hybrid creature will destroy Gallifrey and unravel the Web of Time, wiping out trillions to save itself," the Doctor explained.

"Alright, well, if that's true, then it's quite a good reason to keep the two of them apart, just like we've been trying to do for decades."

"And what if it's not true? There's no concrete proof that it does refer to them, just an idea. It has a dozen different interpretations," the Doctor continued, "And you make a good point about _us_ not threatening anybody. Stupid prophecies are always about me – what makes _me_ so damn special?" she complained, "The one who ran away to travel the universe and married a human."

"Well, there's also the fact that…"

"What?"

"I mean… just that, Gallifrey's still gone in our universe. That's not one of the points where we cross over. Is it possible that a prophecy can refer to one thing in one universe and something else in another?"

"Prophecies are only dangerous when you start believing in them, Coo," she said.

"Prophecies like the one heralding your regeneration, you mean?" Clara challenged, "That, 'he will knock four times' thing?"

"Knowing the future and putting all your faith in riddles and mind-games aren't the same thing. And besides, it was just a regeneration, it's not… it's not the _end_ of anything. You know how Ten is, dramatic about regenerating. Look, let's just agree to keep on the way we have been since she died, lying to Other Me to protect her, alright?"

"I suppose, but what's to say they even will pose a danger anymore?" asked Clara as the Doctor made to leave the room having finished her toast. "This new Doctor has new companions, new friends, right? And Ravenwood's been with Jenny for much longer than she ever travelled with a Doctor. I hardly think there's a risk of her leaving Jenny."

"You know what?" the Doctor began, pausing right outside the library, "This discussion is pointless, because it's not our decision to make, and we don't have the time right now to confer with Ravenwood. If she wants to tell the Yorkshire Doctor she's a vampire one day, then that's her prerogative, not ours."

Clara sighed, thinking, "…You're right."

"So, we keep things schtum. And let Sally and Rose know. Well, mainly Sally, we've got trouble on our hands if she slips up and gives away that she's not the only vampire in our inner circle. It won't take the other Doctor long to put two and two together if she hears that."

"Think of an excuse to talk to Sally. Got it," Clara nodded. She opened the door and immediately was accosted by one very angry vampire brandishing an old tome at her.

"I want a word with you, you little shit," Sally said, practically throwing her against the wall.

"Wow, this is just like a dream I've had," said Clara as the Doctor stepped aside, never one to get involved in Clara's disagreements with women.

"This book belongs with the Gutkeled Archive, so why is it in your house?" Sally asked angrily.

"You leant it to me," said Clara, who was in equal parts intimidated and aroused by Sally threatening her – the black eyes and the white fangs really had an effect.

"No. This is a very valuable and old vampire tome from over a thousand years ago, and it _needs_ to be kept in the special conditions of the archive so that it doesn't rot because it's made of human skin."

" _You let me have it_ ," Clara told her firmly.

"And why would I do that?" Sally hissed.

"Maybe you thought I was somebody else," Clara said quietly. Sally frowned. "Just take it back and don't bring it up again." Sally stepped away from her, taking the tome and protecting it like it was a baby. The truth of the matter was that Sally had given Clara permission to take the book one morning when she had been very groggily awoken some months ago, and Clara had tricked her into the thinking she was Ravenwood to get 'permission.'

"What's in the book?" the 'Astro' Doctor asked, her suspicion returning. They didn't make a very good case for the presence of vampires with Sally flying off the handle, but she was _very_ protective of that archive.

"It's a chronicle of the Gutkeled bloodline dating back to the Tenth Century," she explained.

"And they wrote it on human skin…?" asked Ryan.

"And in human blood, too," she said, opening it gently. The writing was faded.

"Vampires," the Cosmic Doctor tutted, "So theatrical."

"And the Time Lord with the secret, transdimensional library isn't remotely theatrical?" Sally challenged.

"Forgive me for being a bit rusty with my knowledge of European noble families, but wasn't the Báthory family part of the Gutkeled clan?" the Astro Doctor crossed her arms to interrogate Sally, an expert on vampire history and lineage thanks to her years spent collecting the contents of the Gutkeled Archive. "As in, Elizabeth Báthory, the most prolific female serial killer in human history?"

"Vampire history," said Sally, "But, yes. She's in here. And she's much more prolific than you'd think – do you know she didn't die until the 1880s? She was slain. In Whitby, of all the places."

"And what's your interest in it?"

"I'm just an archivist," Sally said, "I don't believe in any of it."

"Any of what?" asked Yaz. The atmosphere had grown very unpleasant very quickly, people now looking at Sally like she was a real threat.

"Alright, well, you know how humans believe that royals and nobles have special blood, or that the monarch is chosen by god? The divine right of kings, and all that?" Sally began, "Vampires believe the same thing about their bloodlines and it goes by who bit who." And both Clara and her Doctor were aware that Sally and Ravenwood did belong to the Gutkeled bloodline; it had been Elizabeth Báthory wreaking chaos in Whitby when Ravenwood had been bitten by one of Báthory's more pathetic underlings, and Sally had been bitten by Ravenwood out of pity to prevent her from dying of terminal cancer (and because Sally had begged.)

"But you said you were attacked in the street and you don't know who bit you," the Astro Doctor reminded her.

"Yeah, well, like I said, I'm only an archivist. The Gutkeleds have wrought a lot of chaos, what can I say? We have relics from the Basarabs, too. That's, um, Vlad the Impaler's house."

"'We'?"

"Esther and I," said Sally, trying to cover her mistake, "Because, we live together, and the archive is in the cellar of the house we both share."

"Along with your coffin," Clara muttered.

"Shut up, Clara. Anyway, the point is this book doesn't belong here and you stole it," she snapped, "I will be taking it back to Westminster when I leave."

"What? You live in _Westminster_?" Yaz could hardly believe it.

"Didn't she mention?" Rose said, "Sally's posh and rich. Why do vampires always seem to be posh and rich?"

"I'm not… rich," said Sally, unable to deny being posh. "It's just a house."

"It's an Edwardian mansion just down the road from Parliament which you inherited," Clara said.

"Yes, _inherited_. I don't have any actual money," she said, "Why are we all quizzing me now? I haven't done anything. _She_ nicked a book from me, and _I'm_ the one who made you aware of these murders – which, by the way, are all connected, so thanks very much, Sally."

"Alright, don't get tetchy," said Rose, "Go drink some blood and get over yourself." Sally grimaced and went with her tome to sit down in one of the armchairs, apparently deciding to disengage herself from their conversation. As she did that, she took out a tell-tale flask and went to sulk.

"Can we, uh, get back to the murders, then? Maybe?" the Astro Doctor suggested.

"Fuck me!" Clara exclaimed, "I forgot to get those shitting laptops… urgh." She vanished in a cloud of smoke.

"Someone needs a cigarette," Sally quipped.

"Don't you encourage her," the Cosmic Doctor warned, "She's trying to quit."

"She's been trying to quit for a very long time, though."

"Still trying. I don't see you trying to renounce blood."

"Erm, that's like trying to renounce food, I'd die," Sally argued. Clara returned shortly, not teleporting for her journey back up the stairs, carrying two computers with her. She phased through the door.

"You shouldn't be teleporting around with your head wound, you know," the Doctor told her off.

"It's an impulse, I can't really control it," Clara defended herself. "Who wants a computer?" It wasn't a contest; each laptop was seized by one of the Doctors. Typical. "What do the rest of us do, then?"

"Do what you usually spend your time doing, I suppose," Sally told her.

"And what might that be?"

"Touching yourself."

"And I'll be sure to think of you while I do it," Clara countered, much to Sally's annoyance.

"Alright, no more talk about wanking," Rose interrupted, "From now on, we only talk about murders. All murders, no wanking." The Cosmic Doctor took the laptop to sit in the other armchair next to Sally, while the Astro Doctor just sat down on the floor. Suddenly, wanking was also the only thing Clara could think about. Well, that and cigarettes.

"Why don't you tell us more about Manifests, then?" Graham stepped up to suggest, "Where do they come from?"

"It's, um… a mutation," Rose began, having to think, "Sorry, it's not really my area of expertise, I think Oswin knows more about it. Or Martha. But Martha's…"

"…It naturally occurs in an incredibly small part of the population," Clara said, "But, the mutation can be forced, with drugs. There was a sort of racket around drugging people and giving them powers, which UNIT tried and failed to contain. Rose and I tried to infiltrate it, ended up drugged, and became Manifests. It's a nasty business, though. They put cigarettes out on my arms."

"Ironic," said Sally.

"I think I remember getting hit in the face with a crowbar, repeatedly," said Rose.

"But – what? Why? Why would anyone do that?" Yaz asked, horrified.

"It needs an adrenaline rush to trigger the powers. A moment of panic, or fear," Clara resumed, "And the most effective way to do that is apparently by torture. Put someone in a life or death situation."

"Ah-ha," the Cosmic Doctor interrupted, "Dexter Willard filed a police report one week ago about being attacked. Says he was grabbed and injected with a syringe, then left in the street. He's not a registered Manifest, either."

"Same for the other victims Sally told us about," the Other Doctor added, "Most of them, actually; minor reports of attacks written off by the police, not registered Manifests, and then they show up dead. Deaths are ruled accidental, just like our John Doe, families none the wiser."

"So, obviously they're being drugged with Xboost," said Clara, "Right? We _know_ it's circulating London and the surrounding areas. These murders have almost entirely been in London and its surrounding areas."

"What about people coming back to life?" Sally asked, "Like Dexter came back to life. Those eyeballs, maybe they _want_ somebody who comes back to life?"

"Why? Why would you want an immortal person?" Ryan asked.

"To reverse-engineer a new serum," said the Astro Doctor, getting an epiphany, "Is that possible? To create specific Manifests, with specific powers? Instead of just letting it be random?"

"UNIT did that," said Rose, "Years ago. In 2017. There were all these werewolves, but they were actually Manifests with the power to turn into wolves."

"So maybe somebody wants to make a Manifest serum capable of turning people immortal. Immortality just, at will. Hence the eyeballs. They alert these 'agents', and they show up and take Dexter alive. _He's_ the one they must want, the one who came back," said the Astro Doctor.

"And they got him," said Graham, "They were long gone by the time we arrived."

"So we need to find someone with pull with the police, access to high-end technology, and the ability to make Xboost?"

"Maybe this is all to do with Xboost?" Clara suggested, "Maybe this is where the Xboost is coming from, this is why it's circulating, because of some… _conspiracy_."

" _Doctor_ ," Helix's smooth voice came floating out of the subtle speakers installed throughout the house, " _I have located the destination of the transmissions the ocular devices are emitting. They are being routed to a facility in London. The facility is registered to_ -" All the lights went out, including both glowing laptop screens, and they were thrown into complete darkness.

"What's going on?" Yaz asked.

"Power cut, I guess," said the Cosmic Doctor.

"A power cut that sucks the electricity out of laptops disconnected from a power source?" the Astro Doctor questioned. The lights began to flash and flicker wildly overhead, Helix's voice stuttering and cutting in and out like he was glitched. Then the lightbulbs themselves blew and shattered. Both Doctors put down the computers immediately, panicking, trying to work out what was going on. But they didn't have to speculate for long.

There was an explosion of blue light in the middle of the room, electricity rushing through the air and making everyone's hair stand on end, imbued with static. And there stood the Lightning Girl, but it was far from a friendly reunion. Esther's costume had burn marks on it, scorched holes and soot, and she wobbled in the midst of the group. When her helmet retracted she gasped for breath and collapsed.

"Esther!" Sally exclaimed, going to her side so quickly it was as though she could teleport, too. "Oh my god, oh my god, _Esther_ , what happened?" She tried to shake Esther and the Doctor heard Esther whisper something unintelligible. "What? What did you say? Esther! Somebody do something!" Sally demanded, "Save her! She's _drained_! She'll _die_ without electricity! What's happened to you? What have they _done_?" she pleaded with Esther directly. All eyes turned to the Cosmic Doctor, while Rose produced one of her golden, glowing orbs to give them light in lieu of working bulbs.

"We need to electrocute her," she said, thinking quickly, "So, um-"

Mattie burst through the door behind her, "What's going on? All the lights in my room just exploded-"

"Mattie! Esther's in trouble, I need you to go into the kitchen and find the serving fork – it's gourmet and made of copper, Jenny got it for me. It's the big, long fork with two sharp tongs, okay? Go, _now_ ," she pushed Matilda out of the room, who was very alarmed and did exactly as asked. "Alright, we're gonna jump her with the car battery."

"You're _what_!?" Yaz asked.

"Jump her – it's fine. Clara and Rose, go and bring the van as close to the front door as possible, the jump leads are underneath the passenger seat, and then hook them up just like you were jump-start another car. Sally, you take Esther downstairs into the hallway, and Ryan help."

"Where do you want us?" the Astro Doctor asked, trusting her other self to know what best to do for Esther. She really wished they had a pair of defibrillators, but they hadn't brought a set from the TARDIS.

"I'm going to find my wire cutters and my gloves, you three go and find wires, preferably lamp wires; tear them out and break the lamp if you have to, we need an exposed end to use. The jump-leads will only get us so far…" They all scattered. Sally, fighting back tears she was so worried about Esther's wellbeing, teamed up with Ryan to carry Esther – who was thankfully still quite a small person – while Clara and Rose both teleported out of the room to sort everything out with the van. The Cosmic Doctor took off for her work benches, covered in machines and other devices, to find the wire cutters, and Yaz, Graham and the Astro Doctor fanned out into the rest of the house to attack the lamps.

Clara sat in the front of the van and lifted the handbrake so Rose could easily push it boot-first towards the door. She fished the jump-leads out from underneath the seat at the same time. The van jerked when its back wheels hit the porch step. Clara put the handbrake back on while Rose opened the engine compartment.

"What do you think happened?" Rose asked quietly, Ryan and Sally bringing Esther down the stairs behind them.

"No idea – hopefully she can tell us, if this works."

"And do you think it will?"

"If you can jump-start a car, you can probably jump-start a Lightning Girl," said Clara, "And I trust the Doctor. God knows what she's planning on doing with the serving fork, though." Rose went to help them finish the journey to the foot of the stairs, and shortly after the Cosmic Doctor came jumping down them with a pair of thick gloves on, holding some wire-cutters. She gave the cutters to Ryan, who hadn't a clue what to do with them, and then went to attach the jump leads to the van's battery.

"How do you take the costume off? We need exposed skin," she said while she did that.

"It's all one thing," Sally said.

"Well – Rose – can you rip an arm off?"

"You want me to rip Esther's arm off?" Rose asked.

"No! The _costume's_ arm, so we can get to _Esther's_ arm underneath!"

"I'll try," said Rose.

"Oswin won't be happy about you destroying that," Clara warned.

"She can make another one! It'll give her something to do," said the Doctor. Whatever material the costume was made of, Rose was able to rip at it, tearing away a whole arm. "Great!" The Doctor took the large crocodile-mouthed jump leads and attached them to Esther's left arm. Mattie reappeared carrying the large, copper serving fork.

"What do I do with this now?" she asked.

"Give it to the other Doctor," she ordered. Mattie nodded and went to do that. "Coo, go start the car, quickly!"

"Right, yeah," Clara nodded and climbed into the front seat of the van, taking out her keys to turn on the ignition. The first time, it stuttered and spat, obviously disrupted by the connection to Esther. The second time the same thing happened; it wasn't until the third attempt that she actually got the engine to start, letting the car sit. They waited with bated breath to see if this scheme would work, and then Esther gasped, waking and coughing.

"What happened?" Sally implored.

"I'll be back in a second," the Cosmic Doctor took her gloves and went back into the house, Clara leaning out through the open door to see what was going on.

"I… I, uh – what's going on? What's on my arm?" Esther asked woozily.

"Jump-leads from the van," Rose explained.

"The battery won't last long," she said, fretting.

"The Doctor's working on a more permanent solution, don't worry," Rose said.

" _What happened_?" Sally persisted.

"It was… it was the bombs, on the airships, it was Prometheus, making them… I went to their HQ, and… and I don't know, something… and I needed to escape, I just… I thought I was gonna die again…"

"You're not going to die," Rose said firmly, "This isn't your time. Trust me." Esther threatened to slip away again.

"Doctor!" Sally shouted through the house. Clara turned and revved the engine to see if that would help, but to her horror, the car died completely.

"Shit," she cursed, trying to start the engine again. The van was electric though, and Esther had been right, it really hadn't lasted long at all. It must take a _lot_ of electricity to keep the fabled Lightning Girl running. Sally continued to shout.

"Bring her into the living room!" the Doctor called back. Rose pulled away the jump-leads and picked up Esther on her own, making it look very easy. Clara jumped out of the van and followed a frantic Sally into the living room, where the Doctor ordered for Esther to be placed on the sofa. In her gloved hands, the Doctor held the copper carving fork, stripped-down wires coiled around its prongs. The wire had come from a lamp in their bedroom, Clara recognised, but its end had been cut away by the wire-cutters and now it was plugged into the wall socket by the lobster tank. She pushed everyone else away to kneel by Esther's side. "Esther, can you hear me?" Esther nodded, but just barely. Everyone, including Mattie, crowded around the sofa to see what was going to happen. "Okay, I'm really sorry for what I'm about to do."

"What are you going to – ARGH!" Esther screamed when the Doctor stabbed her in the arm with the carving fork, then shouted for the Astro Doctor to turn on the plug socket. When she did that, Esther screamed again, and all the electrical devices began to fluctuate wildly. The television came on blaring brightly and Helix began talking overhead. "Are you kidding me!?"

"I know! I said I'm sorry, just try to stay calm, try to – Esther?" Esther had fallen into unconsciousness again, though. The Doctor found her sonic screwdriver and scanned the wounded Lightning Girl up and down, then breathed deeply. "She's gonna be fine now she's connected to the national grid. The only casualty here is going to be our next electric bill. Sal, did you hear me? She's going to be alright."

Clara touched Sally's shoulder and spoke to her softly, "Do you want me to get you some tissues?" Sally nodded and Clara went to retrieve a box of tissues from next to the egg chair.

"She said Prometheus did this," Sally repeated Esther's words.

"She said they were the ones who put the bomb on that rain machine earlier," Ryan added.

"It makes sense," said the Cosmic Doctor, "Smiles has been very publicly trying to create a counter-measure for the Lightning Girl for months. I guess he worked out how to do it."

" _Doctor_ ," Helix interrupted them, " _Before I was disrupted my Miss Drummond's arrival, I discovered the ocular device transmissions were being routed to a facility in London. The facility belongs to a shell company of Prometheus Pharmaceuticals_."

"A company owned by a megalomaniac billionaire obsessed with Manifests," Clara said, "Prometheus must be the ones making Xboost, they must be the ones circulating it to try and find someone with the power of immortality. And then they can sell immortality to the highest bidder."

"Just as I suspected!" the Cosmic Doctor announced, "Capitalism was the real villain all along."

"That must be why they're going after CyTech, too," Rose added, "Adam Mitchell's a Manifest, too, and he's almost immortal. No doubt he's also convinced Esther is one. And weren't the HCC doing the same thing? Engineering drugs to make the Manifest Crisis _worse_ so that they could profit?"

"Don't Prometheus fund those Manifest prisons we heard about on the news earlier?" Yaz asked.

"Manifest Observation Complexes," said Clara, "Yeah, they do. They have more than enough money and sway to pay off the police, too. Think about it – the more Manifests they make, the more prisons for them are needed, et cetera…"

"It's the prison industrial complex, Coo," the Cosmic Doctor added. "That must be why people are being killed so violently, too. Torture is the quickest way to force the Manifest gene to trigger, and since they only want the immortal ones…"

"That's our next step, then," the Astro Doctor, "We'll go to this facility. It must be where they've taken Dexter Willard."

"I agree," said the Cosmic Doctor, "We can't let a worm like Will Smiles get his hands on the means to manufacture immortality. At least when the vampires do it there are nullifying side-effects; Sally can't even eat garlic bread."

"So it's decided," the Astro Doctor declared, "We'll all go to Prometheus's secret facility and put a stop to this conspiracy."

"I don't think so," said Rose, crossing her arms, "I think that you should probably stay here. All of you. And maybe Clara and I should go to Prometheus." Predictably, there was mass outrage from everybody in the room except Matilda, Sally, and Esther – though Esther was unconscious, so she didn't necessarily count.

"You can't seriously think-"

"-just sit by and watch-"

"-on your own with no backup-"

"-after everything he's done-"

"Alright, _everybody be quiet_ ," said Clara loudly with more authority than anybody was expecting; the Cosmic Doctor knew this was her 'teacher voice' she used to demand respect from unruly teens. And unruly adults as well, it seemed. "We do actually have neighbours, and you're all being very loud-" Shouting started again and continued until she clapped her hands and got up to stand next to Rose, "This is my house, so you will listen to me. Including you," she indicated her wife, who scoffed indignantly. "If he can do _that_ to _Esther_ and has hit squads of _assassins_ hunting down Manifests to murder them, and has the police in his pocket, then none of you are safe in that facility."

"Excuse me, I'm a trained police officer," Yaz argued.

"That's great, Yaz, and not to sort of, belittle that or anything, but Rose and I basically can't die, and you all definitely can die, including the Time Lords," Clara said.

"Plus, this seems like a Manifest thing. The Manifests should probably go sort it. I mean, if we need anybody else we could always call…" Rose stopped to think of who they could call, but the list of Manifests they knew and could get in contact with was very small. "…Donna."

"We probably won't call Donna, though," said Clara.

"Adam?"

"No, he's too fragile, don't you remember when he got that paper cut?"

"You can't just expect us to sit here and wait while you go risking your lives," the Astro Doctor argued vehemently.

"But, they can't die, and you can, so," Mattie interrupted to speak.

"Yes," said Clara, "Matilda is right. But she should go to bed soon."

"It's a weekend!" Mattie protested, "And there's stuff happening."

"I also think you should stay behind," said Sally, most of her attention fixed on Esther, however, "I'm sure those two will be fine."

"And what do _you_ think?" the Astro Doctor challenged her other self, getting very annoyed at people not listening to her.

"Me?" the Cosmic Doctor asked, "What do I think about…? Uh… well, as much as I hate to send her off on her own because I do miss her deeply whenever she isn't next to me, I think Clara and Rose are more than capable of dealing with one egomaniac. And he won't have countermeasures developed for them like he's built for Esther. He's been talking about those damn countermeasures for months."

"I can't believe this," the Astro Doctor shook her head.

"Maybe it's not a completely bad idea," said Graham, "I mean, the four of us split off a lot. And we can't teleport around willy-nilly like them."

"The argument is pointless because we'll just leave without you," Rose shrugged, indifferent, "Helix – where, exactly, is this secret lab of Prometheus's? Is there an address?" There was an address, and Helix smoothly gave Rose the details and some brief directions. She nodded as took in the information, "I think I can get us there."

"No! You can't just _decide_. I thought you lot love to vote on everything, anyway?" she challenged.

"Things have changed," said Rose coolly, "There aren't many of us left."

"Well… regardless, you can't just shut us out."

"All due respect, the four of you hanging out in my house doesn't sound like you're being shut out at all," Clara said.

"Urgh! This is a waste of time," Rose was annoyed, "Come on, let's just go." She touched Clara's arm, and in the split-second moment between her doing that and teleporting away, the Astro Doctor indignantly lunged for them, grabbed Clara, and all three vanished in a shimmer. Silence fell across the living room until Sally Sparrow – always one to enjoy the sound of her own voice – felt compelled to break it.

"That settles that, then."


	25. Double Blind - Chapter 5

_Double Blind_

 _5_

Clara was slammed very hard against an uncomfortable, metal surface; from the way it dug into her back she deduced it was shelving, but she was more concerned that somebody was actively pushing her like they were in the midst of an illicit rendezvous. The Thirteenth Doctor had lunged to stop them from teleporting without her and must have lost her balance in the kerfuffle.

Clara cleared her throat, "If you want me all to yourself, you only have to ask." The Doctor scoffed and let her go. There was no light source in whatever room they had appeared in; she had not even been able to _see_ the other Doctor in front of her, though she had been more than close enough for Clara to note that this one did not have that strange cinnamon scent sticking to her skin like the Cosmic Doctor did. Then again, maybe it was being overpowered by another stench thick in the air, something Clara couldn't quite put her finger on.

"You don't actually _need_ to try and shag everyone you meet, Clara," Rose said from somewhere nearby, in the gloom.

"I wasn't the one pushing people against walls," said Clara, reaching into her coat pocket to take out her lighter. With it, she illuminated a very sheepish Doctor.

"I did not intend for that to happen," she said firmly, "For the record."

"Maybe I'm just irresistible," said Clara, then she turned to look around the room and nearly shrieked at what she saw had been on the shelf just behind her. "Fucking hell! Is that a brain!?"

"What?" asked the Doctor, snatching the lighter from her hand. Rose scrambled to pull out her phone and switch on the torch, at which point most of the room came into view. They were in a very small room, only a little larger than a storage cupboard, full floor to ceiling with human brains kept preserved and floating in jars. That was the strong smell: formaldehyde.

"And I thought Donna and Amy keeping their brains in jars was weird," said Rose, staring around.

"Sorry, could you just explain every single word you just said?" the Doctor asked her.

"They were abducted by these aliens, and then their brains were… Donna's still not got a brain. She got hit in the head once, it was awful. I've got photos if you want? Massive dent," said Rose. The Doctor paused to think.

"…No, thanks. To the photos. They keep their brains external to their bodies?"

"Ood do that, don't they?" Clara asked, getting out her own phone eventually since the Doctor apparently didn't think to relinquish the lighter; ironic since she was so offended by smoking.

"Well, yeah, but humans aren't really built for that sort of thing."

"Look, if you want us to call Donna and get her to show you the tank she keeps her brain in, we'll have plenty of time later," said Rose, "It's not like she's _that_ busy."

"Where is she?"

"On the TARDIS. My TARDIS, with my Doctor," she said, "We've got three TARDISes now."

"Funny universe, this…"

"They're labelled," Clara said, leaning in to squint at the tanks, "This one says 'super-strength'… 'flight'… 'telekinesis' up there, I think… 'telepathy'…"

"These are Manifest brains," Rose realised, "All those ones he drugged and killed, he still took their brains anyway, even if they weren't immortal."

"Oh my god…" said Clara, "Do you remember _Heroes_?"

"Excuse me?"

"I remember it," said the Doctor. Of course she did.

"Well, they all had superpowers, and one of them was a serial killer who took the brains of others to steal their powers," Clara explained.

"And what did he do with the brains?" Rose asked, "Like, eat them?"

"Can't remember," she said, "But some of these brains have bits missing…"

"He must be trying to manufacture drugs for every superpower… obviously, immortality has the biggest price tag," the Doctor thought out loud, "But I'm sure you could charge a _lot_ of money for some of these."

"Like in _Misfits_ ," said Rose.

"Okay, so you've seen _Misfits_ , but not _Heroes_?"

"Why have _you_ seen so much TV?"

"Have you like, met or spoken to my wife, ever?" Clara asked sarcastically, "Or my reclusive sister who hardly ever goes outside? Or Adam Mitchell, the _other_ person I've been living with for decades? All nerds."

"Yeah, alright," Rose muttered, "So you can sell superpowers for profit and he's got some gross brain-harvesting business going…"

"Seems like standard fare for evil drug companies, to be honest," said Clara, walking along the row of brains to read the other jar labels, "Speaking of Adam Mitchell… there's an empty jar here that says 'cryokinesis' on it. Ominous." She unlocked her phone to send a message to the shoddy excuse for a 'group chat' she had with the previous TARDIS residents, which was only herself, Oswin and Adam because the Doctor didn't have a mobile. The only messages in there were Clara inviting them for dinner every few weeks. Now she sent a message asking what the two of them were up to, to find out if they were alright without alarming Oswin by asking if she knew Will Smiles had a jar ready and waiting for Adam's brain to be installed into it. "I wouldn't be surprised if some of these come from the M.O.C.s." There could be as many as a hundred human brains lining the walls of just that room, and who was to say there weren't more rooms, whole facilities, waiting to be filled with organs?

"Eurgh…" said Rose, "It's like he's farming them, farming _people_."

"I think that's exactly what he's doing," said the Doctor.

"Why didn't you want to let us go off on our own, then?" Clara asked her. "Don't you trust us to deal with a Manifest problem?"

"It just all sounded a bit unfair. We come all the way here from a completely different universe, and you want to go off and do everything by yourselves," she argued.

"I see. You've got FOMO."

"Total FOMO," said Rose.

"I do not have… whatever that is – what is it?"

"Fear of missing out," said Clara.

"I do not have a fear of missing out."

"Mm, did you just grab me like that for some _other_ reason, then?"

"Oh my god, you are literally so annoying," Rose muttered.

"Yeah, that's another thing," the Doctor said quickly, trying to divert scrutiny away from herself while they continued to read the labels on the many brains, "I thought you two don't like each other?"

"…We're fine," said Clara after a few seconds, "Things are different now. Since Mickey and Martha died and Mattie came to live with us."

"Oh, right…" said the Doctor, understanding Clara's implication that Rose was lonely.

"How'd you meet that lot, then? That must be a less depressing topic," Rose said.

"On a train," she said, "Alien stuff."

"And you just _happened_ to run into a pair of conventionally attractive nineteen-year-olds, did you?" Clara quipped, "Isn't that always the way."

"They're my friends! It's not like that. You see, this is what I haven't missed about you, you're filthy," she said, "Both of you, in fact."

"And you are so lucky you didn't show up on a day when Oswin was visiting," said Clara.

"Shh," Rose said. She was closest to the door out of the storage room, "I can hear voices."

"Who is it?" Clara whispered. They hadn't exactly been trying to be quiet. "Is it guards, or something? Looking for us?"

"I don't think so," said Rose, "It's just someone talking."

"Who to?"

"Themselves, I think."

"I have an idea; one of you give me a phone," asked the Doctor, holding out her hand. Rose just looked at her blankly, aghast at the suggestion of giving her phone to somebody else. Clara, however, was very used to lending her phone out to people, especially her wife who viewed Clara's phone almost like it was collectively owned. She handed Thirteen the phone, who promptly took out her amber screwdriver and did something to it. Then she put a finger to her lips and set the phone down on the floor by the door, and they listened as it picked up the distant, mumbled voices and amplified them back.

"That's Will Smiles!" Clara exclaimed, an exclamation which was projected back at them at a much higher volume. The Doctor hit her on the arm and glared, then put her finger to her lips once again to indicate that they all needed to be quiet, too.

" _What was that?_ " Smiles' voice asked. Nobody replied to him. " _Strange noises in here sometimes, Dexter. I think it's something to do with the brains. They whisper, especially at night_." Rose and Clara exchanged a look that meant Smiles was obviously insane, though maybe they were a little slow on the uptake since he was killing people and harvesting their brains in an elaborate conspiracy. " _Did I tell you about the brains yet, Mr Willard? I wonder what will happen to your brain, whether it will grow back. I'll tell you what I'm doing, Mr Willard, because you're never going to leave this room no matter how many times your brain grows back. I'm going to be rich. I'm going to be the richest person alive. I'm going to live forever, be all-powerful. I know what you're thinking_ ," Smiles laughed coldly here, " _That sounds like something a comic book villain would say! Well, perhaps it is. But this is a world with plenty of would-be heroes, so is it surprising?_

" _The Lightning Girl, for instance. A thorn in my side. She's making people sympathetic to the Manifests, making them acceptable when really they need to be eradicated. They don't deserve their gifts, only people like me do. Innovators – innovators and their paying customers. Only the people at the top of society deserve these abilities so that we can preserve the natural order. Do you understand that, Mr Willard? You don't deserve this power you have. And I know what you're thinking, I'm the one who gave it to you. And you're right. You're half right. You always had the genetic potential, serum or not, I only sped the process along. It's a predisposition you don't deserve. A genetic impurity that grants eternal life! I could cry at the irony, at what a marvellous sense of humour the universe has… to give abilities to people like you, while worthy people like me go without._

" _And what did the Lightning Girl do to deserve this attention? Save a few lives? Show off? She makes people forget how dangerous it is letting people like you, like her, onto the streets. And don't get me started on… Adam Mitchell_ ," he said Adam's name like it physically pained him, " _He disgusts me. But don't worry, Dexter. I'm working on that. Soon I'll take his brain, too – my scientists know he can't heal himself from injuries. He's made of glass, and so is his reputation. I'm sure he has a million filthy secrets, skeletons rotting in his closets. Nobody can be that good, that_ generous _. He probably has scams running. He could be an international drug dealer for all the world knows. I've already planted bombs on those abominable rain machines… why prevent climate change? An apocalypse would wipe out the scum of mankind and leave people like me, Will Smiles, genius inventor, to rise from the ashes…_ " Clara picked up her phone and closed it, killing the microphone effect in the process.

"He's mental," she said.

"Have to agree with you," said the Doctor, "Why's he so obsessed with Adam Mitchell? Just because he's a philanthropist?"

"Smiles is a capitalist, what do you expect?" Clara asked, "Look, I've already dealt with one power-hungry lunatic this year, I can't be bothered to listening to the monologue of another one."

"What lunatic?" Rose asked.

"When we went back in time to the Sixties. In May. You weren't there," Clara said. "We went to the races and the Doctor accidentally walked in on a bloke getting sucked off. Very awkward."

"Sounds it…" muttered the other Doctor, "Right, then. I have a plan. I say we go in there, and deal with him."

"Can't be a bit more specific, or-?"

"Deal with him," she repeated firmly. "Come on." One by one and very carefully, Clara phased them all through the door of the storage room.

Dexter Willard, bloody and filthy, was strapped to a tabled in a glass tank in the centre of a vast and dark laboratory. There were no windows, the walls lined with glowing tanks filled with bright, artificial liquids. The tank was clearly being used as a cell, presumably for whatever Manifest of the day Smiles had captured in his supervillain lair, and was in a large, sunken floor surrounded by railings and then dozens of advanced computers. He was pacing around Willard, who looked terrified and was gagged and strapped down tightly, with his back to the storage room door. By his side, there was a tray covered in medical instruments; syringes, vials and jet injectors, as well as an array of sharp and violent tools. Looking at the scene, Clara felt like she was in a 1980s children's cartoon; it was one of the most clichéd 'secret labs' she had ever seen.

"…Well?" the Doctor whispered to them. Rose elbowed Clara.

"Go on," she hissed, "Say something annoying, get his attention." Clara clenched her jaw and stepped towards the railings, leaning on them with her elbows.

"How many gallons of water does that thing hold?" she asked loudly, and Smiles jumped and dropped a scalpel on the floor next to Willard's gurney. "Is it big enough for a shark? Because I think that's what this place needs – a shark tank. Honestly, it's like a Bond film in here."

"Who the hell are you!? How did you get in? I have wall-to-wall security out there," he snarled at them furiously, walking up to the edge of his glass tank.

"How do you get out? Does it have a door?" Clara asked.

"It's like that painting – what's it called?" the Doctor said.

" _Nighthawks_ ," she answered, "And it does look like that. Don't think Edward Hopper was into human experimentation, though – is it legal what you're doing here? Because it looks like a gross violation of basically every human rights law."

"Dexter here is legally dead. He doesn't have any protections."

"What a nice loophole," said Clara.

"I'm only going to ask you one more time: _who are you_?"

"Friends of the Lightning Girl. Some people call me the Phantom."

"Do they?" asked the Doctor half laughing.

"Yes," said Clara seriously, "They do."

"And who are your friends, 'Phantom'?" he mocked.

"I'm the Doctor," said Thirteen, waving.

"I'll just be Rose," Rose muttered, "Can't be bothered with these stupid names today… Look, mate, basically, you're a headcase, and we're here to stop you from torturing people and trying to make more drugs, yeah?"

"And which street corner did they find you on, 'mate'?"

"Erm, what did you just say?" Rose asked, making to step towards him. Clara grabbed her arm. Rose was much stronger than Clara and could have probably broken her wrist if she continued her advance, but Clara had seen something. There was a shadow creeping around behind Smiles' tank. Rose spotted it too and Clara let go of her arm.

"I said, which street corner did they find you on?" he repeated himself. Clara squinted to try and see who was moving in the background.

"Just one in London," said Rose absently, forgetting all about what he had been saying.

"Soho?"

"What?"

"Did they find you in the red-light district?" Rose didn't answer. "Are you a prostitute?"

"No," she said quite blankly.

"You should really pay more attention to me," he threatened.

"Course," said Clara. Was the shadowy figure on their side? Or was it some security goon of Smiles', one of his hitmen who had kidnapped Dexter? They were pretty terrible hitmen though, skulking around directly opposite the intruders.

"Do you fancy Adam Mitchell?" the Doctor asked him, crossing her arms.

"Ex _cuse_ me?"

"Adam Mitchell. Do you fancy him? You seem a bit obsessed with him, that's all, and people always want him to talk about you in interviews, and when he doesn't talk about you, you get a bit upset. Publicly attack him. I was once married to a woman who spent _years_ trying to assassinate me."

"What's your point?"

"There's a fine line between love and hate."

"I do not _fancy_ him. That's disgusting."

"You're not being homophobic, are you?" the Doctor asked.

"What? No – I – it's not gays, the gays don't disgust me-"

"Convincing," Clara muttered, then mimicked, "'The gays,'" while doing air quotes.

"Adam Mitchell disgusts me."

"Because you're very confused about your feelings for him," the Doctor nodded knowingly. The shadow continued its approach, Clara trying to work out if it might be _the_ Shadow, the covert assassin, but it definitely seemed to have more of an outline and a shape to the black void that the Shadow was. An oddly familiar outline and shape, though? Maybe Clara's eyes were failing her – she was in her seventies, after all.

"I don't – did he send you here? Is that what this is? He found out I killed his precious, pathetic Lightning Girl? Is this another of his schemes, helping deluded girls from poor backgrounds feel good about themselves? You should just crawl back to whatever gutter you came from," he said.

It was Jenny. Of course it was Jenny. Clara would recognise her anywhere, and she slid into the light for just a second, met Clara's eyes, and put a finger to her lips to indicate they shouldn't point out her presence. By the way the Doctor tensed up, Clara knew they were now all aware of the intruder.

"The Lightning Girl's not dead, actually," Clara said, "She's injured, but she'll be fine. She's also not a Manifest, she's something completely different. Something you won't understand."

"A cyborg working for CyTech."

"She doesn't work for anybody, she's just a good person, trying to do good things, like most people in the world," Clara argued, "Not that you'd know anything about that."

"Everything I do is for the betterment of humanity."

"Do you actually believe that?" Clara questioned. Rose swore under her breath next to her. Jenny, completely silently, scaled the back wall of the tank, about eight feet of glass, then perched on the edge. It didn't seem like it had a roof by the way she crept along it so carefully.

"I'm the one who cured meningitis. Not Adam Mitchell."

"And then you patented your cure and charge people a fortune for it," Clara pointed out.

"I'm running a business. I can't afford to give things away. I'm not a bleeding-heart socialist like Adam Mitchell."

"There you go again, talking about him – I really think you should tell him you're in love with him," said the Doctor, "Maybe you'll stop being such a maniac if you confess your feelings. Unless those rumours about him having a secret wife are true?"

"He doesn't have a secret wife," Smiles scoffed, "I'm not gay, but he definitely is." Oswin had been trying for fifty years to get Adam to admit to being anything other than a bland heterosexual to no avail – it was perhaps her biggest disappointment in life. But there was nothing else wrong with the boy, Clara knew; he was practically a saint. In fact, a few years ago there had been talk circulating about a sainthood for him, but he'd laughed them down. And he'd turned down every other offer of honours or decoration in his life. Except, of course, the offer of Oswin being his very real but very secret wife. Secret to the Twenty-First Century public, that was. "What are you supposed to be? A few Manifests come to save your own kind from the purity it needs?"

" _Purity_? Are you a Nazi now, too?" Jenny interjected, scaring the absolute life out of him. Then she jumped from the top of the tank, elbow first, and smashed him right in the face, knocking him to the floor.

"Who the fuck are you?" Smiles snarled at her, scrambling away in his tank and getting to his feet.

"No one you need to concern yourself with."

"Yeah – why are you here, though? Who sent you?" Clara asked her.

"Oswin, she's been looking into the bombs and Xboost. You know, like _you_ asked her to? And then we got the data from Esther's suit, so she sent the pair of us to-" Smiles grabbed something from the trolley next to Willard and lunged for Jenny with it, cutting her off. But she was ready for him and dodged his slash quite easily. "Is that a syringe!? What's in there?"

"Wouldn't you like to know," he said, trying to stab her with it again. For all they knew it was filled with a lethal dose of anaesthetic, and while a lethal dose for a human wouldn't kill Jenny, it was more than capable of putting her out of action. Sickeningly, anaesthetic was probably the best-case scenario for what concoction Smiles was trying to smite her with.

Rose teleported down into the sunken floor and the tank exterior. Clara phased through the railing while the Doctor vaulted over it as they hastened to follow her, Jenny expertly dodging slash-after-slash from Smiles. Eventually, she grabbed hold of his wrist to stop him mid-swing, then kicked him in the knee sharply enough to make him buckle and crash to the floor. Unfortunately, he was injured in the fall.

"Oops…" said Jenny uncertainly. Their scuffle had been incredibly brief, probably thanks to Jenny being an elite, alien super-soldier and Smiles nothing more than a slimy industrialist, but the way he had landed after Jenny had kicked him led to him inadvertently stabbing _himself_ in the neck with his syringe. "What's in there?" she asked him, but he started to gasp and convulse.

"That doesn't look good – get out of there," Clara advised from the outside of the tank.

"Did you say there are two of you?" the Doctor interjected.

"Did – what? Who are you?" Jenny asked her blankly.

"The Doctor."

"What's going on?"

"What's-? We could ask you the same bloody question!" Rose shouted at her.

"But you said the pair of you," the Doctor reiterated as Clara's heart missed a beat – she really _was_ onto them, "You said Oswin sent _the pair of you_ -"

"Look out!" Clara warned, but she wasn't quick enough, nor was Jenny. It still wasn't clear what Smiles had accidentally been injected with, but he now moved faster than Clara had ever seen anything move – anything except for the Lightning Girl and a younger Rani Chandra at the height of her powers. Anything except for a speedster. He slammed into Jenny so hard she went flying, shattering an entire glass face of the cuboid tank. And Rose, though she certainly had the means, was not the one who caught Jenny before she went crashing to the ground and breaking her bones. Something else, dark and smoky, came flying from the air somewhere above them and knocked Jenny away from the edge of the sunken floor, rescuing her from cracking her skull open. Ravenwood must have been lurking on-high as a bat, flying down at the last moment to materialise in her human-form and make sure Jenny landed somewhere else. But Clara still heard a nasty crack and a distinct shriek of pain.

"Jenny?" asked Ravenwood pleadingly at her side. Smiles pulled the syringe out of his neck and crushed it to pieces in his hand, grinding it to dust.

"I'm fine," Jenny gasped. She didn't sound it. In a fit of rage Smiles went for her again, and Ravenwood was in no position to stop him. She plainly tried her best and was stronger, faster, and deadlier than a human in that situation, but Smiles just knocked her aside like she was nothing and went to lift Jenny off her feet. That was when Rose, who had been in shock up until then, realised she _had_ to intervene before he did to Jenny what he had done to the syringe; there was no regeneration from getting her brain crushed.

"You think you can break in here and inject me with that shit? That was a prototype, the side-effects could kill me." He was seething but didn't raise his voice, just spat angrily and tried to intimidate her. The Doctor also stunned by what was happening – namely Ravenwood's unprecedented arrival – it came down to Rose to tackle Smiles and knock him away from Jenny. Normally, Rose could stop a plane mid-flight by employing the right amount of force, but not this time, because Smiles was more than a match for her. Though she did manage to get him to relinquish Jenny, it was no different to trying to bring down a grown man without any superpowers at all.

"He's a Manifest!" the Doctor shouted, "The brains – and the drugs – whatever was in that syringe must be some sort of serum – if you can charge millions for _one_ superpower, imagine what people will pay for dozens of them in one hit!?"

"That's not it at all," said Smiles, kicking Rose in the shin and hurting her a great deal. Rose hadn't been physically hurt for a very long time and was stunned by the sensation, while Ravenwood again attempted to pull a wounded Jenny out of harm's way. " _I_ am exceptional, and in a world where anyone can be a superhero, I need a way to make it clear I'm a cut above the rest."

"You're just greedy, that's all you are," said the Doctor angrily, "Greed and nothing else. Trying to give yourself the powers of every single Manifest? At once? Is that where those brains are going? Just to you?"

"But I wasn't supposed to take it yet," he turned his attention on Jenny again.

"You don't fucking touch her," Ravenwood threatened.

"Or you'll do what? What _are_ you, exactly?" He advanced and Clara sent a wave of telekinesis to stop him, holding out her hand because Rose had been thrown away uselessly, and she really didn't have the skill to actually _fight_ somebody whose super-strength was on equal footing with hers. Unfortunately, super-strength wasn't his only duplicate power; he held up his own hand and sent a much more powerful and aggressive bout of energy at Clara, enough to knock her off her feet.

"So much for being powerful Manifests who could have this wrapped up in a matter of minutes," the Doctor quipped.

"Jenny's the one who injected him!" Rose argued.

" _Oh_. A vampire," said Smiles, "They're real, are they?"

"How do-?" Ravenwood asked.

"I read your mind. I can read _all_ your minds. You're mostly thinking about me, and I'm flattered, but _you_ …" he turned his gaze on Clara and frowned, "You're thinking about pornography."

"Why are you thinking about porn right now!?" Rose demanded.

"I'm not! I mean – it's just – it's like in the background, I don't know!"

"Do you know how much money you could make?" he continued to question Ravenwood, then he teleported in a blur to crouch in front of her, next to Jenny who was curled up with her eyes closed after her nasty impact with the floor. "One bite could earn billions. You can gift immortality already – that's my life's work. And all this time…"

"I'm not in the habit of making more vampires," she told him coldly, " _I'm_ not the monster here."

"And yet you drink human blood… why are the two of you-?" He was midway through presumably asking why Clara and Ravenwood were identical (because they were the exact same person), glancing between them, when Rose grabbed him and teleported him. But this, too, was a fruitless effort; his teleportation was clearly just as good as Rose's, because within seconds he had brought them back, and they proceeded to disappear and reappear for a few seconds until Smiles telekinetically blasted Rose away from him. "What's the point of this? You can't stop me," he dodged another lunge from Rose, flitting just a few feet to the side.

"Wouldn't be so sure about that," said the Doctor, "What was in that serum? Because I didn't know it was possible for a Manifest's powers to activate _immediately_ after consuming the serum. So that makes me think you mixed in a _lot_ of adrenaline, in order to trigger all those superpowers you've gathered. And you said it was an untested prototype, with side-effects. How long do you think it'll take for those side-effects to kick in?" He glared at her, breathing deeply, his face already sunken and covered in sweat – not that he looked particularly healthy at the best of times. "Your heart must be racing right now, or maybe it's skipping beats? Funny thing about adrenaline, if you get _too_ over-stimulated on it, it'll stop your blood flowing properly. First, your toes and fingers go numb, then your arms, and eventually your respiratory system. Do you know what happens to your internal organs when they stop getting blood pumped to them? The tissue starts to die. Of course, in an emergency adrenaline injection can be very useful – for heart attacks, allergic reactions, you know the stuff – but, you weren't having a heart attack. Or an allergic reaction. You weren't _really_ doing anything."

"So?" he said. "You think something like that will stop me?"

"Something like your own heart stopping? You know, I've got a funny feeling it might."

"Who are you? What are you?" he asked. He made to flit towards her but collapsed halfway through his advance, and she stayed high and mighty above the sunken floor, leaning on the railings.

"I'm the Doctor. And I've got two hearts, so the chances of what's happening to _you_ happening to _me_ are a lot slimmer. What's your background in, exactly? Computing? Medicine? What? What are your qualifications?"

"I'm an _innovator_. An _inventor_."

"He was privately educated by rich parents," Clara said, "Got a third, from Cambridge, in history and politics."

"I've _worked_ ," he argued.

"You haven't worked for anything, and now look at you. Injecting yourself with chemicals you probably haven't even tried to understand. Kidnapping people, killing them, torturing them – and for what? Money? Fame?" He began gasping for air, falling. He began to flicker and twitch like his body was trying to teleport to a dozen different places at once, writhing, convulsing.

"We should do something," said Rose urgently, "Take him to a hospital."

"There's no time," said the Doctor, "He's been dead since the moment he took that."

"Don't say that," said Ravenwood, "Don't act like this is Jenny's fault. And – what do you mean you're the Doctor? Doctor who?" Thirteen declined to answer.

"There's something almost poetic about being destroyed by your own hubris like this," the Doctor said, watching Smiles. But then he convulsed so hard he looked like a rubber band snapping and there was a noise so strange Clara couldn't describe it, but going by the blood that started to spread across his chest she knew what had happened: Will Smiles' heart had exploded, before he'd been able to add Dexter Willard's immortality to the mix. Dexter Willard who had been forced to watch this play out, while gagged. They stopped and stared.

"That's cold," Rose told the Doctor.

"Oh, really? Because what I find cold is when it turns out that one of my companions isn't actually dead at all, but has apparently been living as a vampire for decades right under my nose with you lot lying to me and covering it up," she argued, indicating Ravenwood.

"What are you talking about?" Ravenwood looked up, but she was still poring over Jenny, "Wait – you're not-?"

"Old Twelvey's regeneration, yeah," said Rose.

"And also," Clara interjected, then indicated her other self and very unconvincingly said, "Oh my god, I thought she was dead all these years as well!"

"You should be ashamed of yourself," said the Doctor.

"I'm terribly ashamed of her," muttered Ravenwood.

"Well?"

"Well what?" Rose asked.

"What's going on! Because _she_ died and I had all my memories of her erased. Then I got them back when I regenerated, and I've always wondered exactly what happened to her – I know she pretended to be a waitress, and went off with Ashildr, and now what? This is how you cheat death? Become a vampire?"

"That's not what happened at all," said Ravenwood, getting to her feet and matching the Doctor's angry tone, "At least, I don't think it is, because all I can remember is one day you show up for another trip out in the TARDIS to visit Rigsy, or something, and then five minutes later I'm being woken up tied down to a chair to make sure I don't murder anybody and drink their blood. Jenny told me that _she_ ," she pointed at Clara, "used her nanogenes to dig me out of my coffin and then we happened to go to Victorian Whitby where I got bitten by some scrawny, runt vampire who was the offspring of Elizabeth Báthory. Not that I can remember any of that, because of the whole frozen-in-time thing I only found out about because Ashildr came to my house looking for a vampire to slay. So maybe you should tell me what happened – or you know what? Don't, because this, here," she motioned to Jenny, curled up and motionless, "is my wife, and she's in a lot of pain, so that's my priority."

"Still had time to monologue, though…" Rose muttered.

"Your _wife_!?" the Doctor exclaimed, "And you used your nanogenes to bring her back!?"

"Okay, fine, _maybe_ I have a complex," Clara said huffily.

"Stop worrying about me," Jenny mumbled. So she wasn't unconscious. Ravenwood immediately dropped to her side again. "I've just got, I don't know, a few broken ribs. Maybe a punctured lung. Arm might be a bit…" she stuck out her left arm and Rose had to look away; there was a bone protruding from the skin of her forearm. With Smiles taken care of Jenny struggled to get back to her feet, wincing and clutching her side with the arm that wasn't broken. She'd hit her face on the floor, too; it was red and certainly going to come up in an unpleasant bruise.

"Wife!?" the Doctor persisted, pointing wildly at them both, " _Wife_!? You've married my daughter!?"

"Uh…" Ravenwood faltered.

"My _daughter_!?"

"This is why I brought her back to life!" Clara argued in her own defence, "What would it have done to Jenny if she died?"

"Sorry – are you implying that there was something going on between them _before she died_!?"

"Oh, well, um…" Ravenwood still couldn't come up with anything good to say. "Maybe we… just saw each other. Once or twice."

"We were sleeping together for months," said Jenny.

"You were _WHAT_!? While you were travelling with _me_ you were off having your way with _my daughter_ behind my back!? Weren't you married!?" she asked Jenny.

"Well, yeah, a bit." Then Jenny flinched and her legs buckled.

"You need to go back to the TARDIS," Rose advised.

"Hold on," the Doctor persisted, "Did you say Elizabeth Báthory bit you? Because I was talking to Sally Sparrow earlier, who said _she_ was part of the Gutkeled bloodline, and-"

"Oh my god, fine, yes, I bit Sally, are you happy now?" Ravenwood said, trying to leave.

"No! Why would you do that!?"

"Because she was dying of thyroid cancer and she begged me on her death bed, alright?" Ravenwood snapped, "Don't get so sanctimonious with me."

"One more question, actually, before I teleport you away," Rose interrupted, "Why _are_ you here? You said something about Oswin?"

"Oswin works with Esther most of the time Esther's out and helps her with intel – she's like, Oracle if Esther's Batman. She suspected that Prometheus was behind Xboost and the bombs in the rain machines, she sent Esther to look into it, Esther got… well, we don't know what happened to Esther."

"She's at our house, she's fine. The Doctor saved her. My Doctor, I mean," said Clara, "Sally's with her."

"Oswin didn't know that you were looking into anything, so she told Jenny and me to look around Prometheus's secret lab after she found out," Ravenwood explained.

"I thought problems like this were the reason we started that group chat to begin with," said Rose, shaking her head, "Are you ready to-?"

"No, no," Jenny said, "Why is the Beta Doctor here at all?"

"Got a new name now. Astro Doctor," said the Doctor, "But we – me and my friends – just found ourselves here, on a rain machine this morning, ran into your Lightning Girl trying to defuse a bomb, and she told us to go to Brighton. Suppose we took a dodgy turn at Fornax A and ended up in the wrong universe."

"Look, you two just think of a plan to deal with… this," Rose glanced at Smiles, "And I'll make sure this one gets actual medical treatment for once."

"Take him," Clara advised, nodding at Willard, "Tell Oswin to cure him and give him some Retcon."

Rose rolled her eyes, "Fine, fine…" In a golden glimmer, Rose disappeared along with Ravenwood, Jenny, and Willard, who was vanished straight from his medical gurney where he'd been watching them with terrified eyes since they'd watched Smiles die and were relatively unfazed about it.

"So, then," said Clara awkwardly in the silence, "What do we do about this body?"

"Leave it there," said the Doctor, "Doesn't matter if someone finds it, he killed himself with his own concoction. Do you have a way to leak information to the public?"

"You want to blow the whistle? I'm sure Oswin and Esther could come up with something."

"We can't exactly call the police if his company is still bank-rolling them. Best thing to do is expose it, make everything here public knowledge. Can't Adam do something?"

"Oh, maybe. He could buy Prometheus and make sure everything gets destroyed, but I don't know how much money CyTech has to spend on stuff like that. You know he gave away his billions and invested them all back into charity and public welfare when he met my sister, he's just given himself and the rest of his staff triple the minimum wage ever since. So I'm not sure he can just _buy_ companies."

"He should try. If Prometheus is distributing Xboost, if they own the Manifest prisons, he could end all that if he had control of the company."

"Well, I'll work on it, once you and your lot leave."

"What?" she was surprised.

"You're not hanging around, are you?"

"I've still got a lot of questions that need answering, actually. Like, what happened to your arm?" she challenged, "What's the real story?"

Clara paused, thinking, but ultimately relented. "There was a serial killer, targeting my Echoes. He was called Liam Kent, completely deranged, and a Manifest – he could manipulate electronics. And I think of them like they're my own, because they are, and I almost killed him when I found him. Esther stopped me. So I keep the scar to remind myself I have a duty of care to them, all of them. And also to remind me never to go too far, which I haven't." While she talked she went to lean against the wall of the sunken floor, which was about four feet high. Will Smiles' body continued to bleed from its ghastly chest wound.

"So, you ruin your arm just like Oswin ruined her legs?"

"In a way," said Clara stiffly. "You know, you're colder than you come across initially."

"And what would your wife have done? Sent him to the TARDIS to try to save his life? Have Rose bring him back? Have Clara bite him?"

"We call her Ravenwood, actually," said Clara.

"Well? I'm waiting for an answer. What would the other Doctor have done?"

Clara stopped to think. What _would_ she have done? Would she have tried to save Smiles, after what he'd done? Shovelling Xboost onto the streets, murdering innocent people, bankrolling the police, building Manifest Observation Complexes as good as prison camps, almost killing Esther, trying to blow up CyTech's rain machines and kill whole countries, withholding medicine that could cure millions…

"Killed by his own ego," said the Doctor after a moment, crouching down to look at the body, "Ironic, after he named his company Prometheus. Humanity's tortured saviour and creator."

"She would have done the same thing," said Clara, "But I think she'd feel worse about it."

"And you don't think I feel bad? I don't like standing by and letting someone die. But I'm not going to manipulate the universe with advanced technology or mutagens or superpowers just to forcibly sustain a life. Not everyone can live forever, even in your universe. Have I ever told you I don't really like it here?"

"No."

"I don't really like it here. How does 'Ravenwood' put up with it? Gives me a headache. Not used to absorbing this exact type of background radiation." She stood up and crossed her arms as she continued to quiz Clara.

"I think she manages by, you know, screwing your daughter at every opportunity," Clara countered, to the Doctor's annoyance, who rolled her eyes.

"And your wife's just fine with that, is she?"

Clara laughed, "Oh, absolutely not. Well, she is _now_ , most of the time, though Christmas dinners are awkward. It was a total nightmare at the beginning, them sneaking around – then my husband found out and tried to ground Jenny. Did not work, she does whatever she wants. But in the end, he walked her down the aisle. In the registry office, because Ravenwood's not good with churches. Y'know, because she's-"

"A vampire?"

"-queer." The Doctor frowned. "And a vampire, obviously. But you know, the queer thing. _I_ don't like going into churches, either. Also, the reason we kept this a secret from you and Retconned you whenever you showed up to investigate her-"

"That explains some foggy patches in my memory…"

"-is because of that bullshit hybrid prophecy from your universe. Which frankly – and I was saying this to my wife earlier – must be a load of bollocks because nobody's come to try and separate the two of us to stop us destroying the universe."

"Well, prophecies can have a myriad of different interpretations," said the Doctor, "But I suppose it did all get a bit extreme towards the end." She stopped to think about this, and Clara didn't have anything else to say for a moment. They were surrounded by glass and blood, and she wondered why Smiles didn't have any security there. Perhaps he was just too conceited to think that anybody would be able to get to him.

"So?" Clara prompted when she got tired of the silence, still waiting for Rose to return, "What are you going to do? Ask her to travel with you again?"

She was surprised, "Should I?"

"Nope."

"I wasn't going to," she said defensively, "Seems like she's got things sussed, anyway, moving onto your TARDIS, with Jenny."

"Mm, she does have to live with my sister as well, though."

"Maybe she would've been better off dead, in that case." Clara laughed a little.

"Oswin tends to have that effect on people."

"Can I ask you something? While we're alone?" she relaxed her stance, dropping her arms by her side again and leaving Smiles alone.

"I'm flattered, but I don't think I can shag anyone with a dead body right there," Clara said wryly as she approached.

"Not that. Why did you want her to leave the TARDIS?"

"I got tired of the stagnation, and I wanted to teach," said Clara truthfully, "The idea is that we oscillate. In ten, fifteen years, when everybody starts to question our age and Matilda's old enough to be on her own or choose to live on the TARDIS, we'll go back. Then, maybe, come to Earth again. Keep switching. I'm not holding her prisoner, and it's not like she has a chance to get bored when shit like this keeps happening."

"Suppose not."

"I wonder if Smiles pays off UNIT…"

"UNIT?"

"Yeah."

"You've still got UNIT!?"

"They showed up to help deal with the trees. We'd already dealt with them, but it's the thought that counts. The Doctor said they were disbanded for a bit, but the aliens kept invading. Do you know anyone called Osgood?"

"Osgood? My biggest fan. Nerdy scientist. Has asthma, hangs around with a Zygon copy of herself. Or she did, until Missy killed one of them; no idea which," she explained, leaning on the wall with her shoulder, next to Clara.

"Her Cosmic-Verse double is the leader of UNIT."

"What? How old is she?"

"Not a clue. She's got a Scek. Which the Doctor says is kind of like a symbiote."

"Oh, I know what a Scek is. That's a terrible idea, like making a deal with the devil."

"She said that, too. Apparently, it's called Splodge."

"Well, that's the most ridiculous thing I've heard all day. And trust me, I've heard a _lot_ of ridiculous things today," she said, shaking her head.

"If you actually know Osgood, or at least one version of her, do you think we can trust UNIT to get rid of all the stuff here?" Clara surveyed the room and its torture equipment and many, mysterious liquids again.

"Osgood will basically do anything I recommend, so if you manage to get to her directly, then she should sort all this out," the Doctor advised. "But you want to keep a close eye on her and that Scek."

"How pissed off are you about your Clara being a vampire married to Jenny, then? Just out of ten?" she asked, stepping closer to the other Thirteen.

"It's a very difficult emotion to quantify. Are they happy?"

"Yeah."

"Then I suppose that's all there is to it. And if the other Doctor's happy playing house for some reason that's completely inconceivable to me, then fair play to you. Bet you're glad me and my friends showed up and helped you sort out this Xboost mess, though."

"It's all thanks to you, is it?"

"Who else would it be thanks to?" she pretended to be oblivious.

"Is it too much to hope that one day there might be a version of you who doesn't have this unbearable ego?" Clara lowered her voice, leaning closer.

"I don't believe you've ever hoped for that, Clara."

"Gets very tiring being married to someone who thinks the world of themselves, you know."

"Should ask your wife how she does it. She'll give you some pointers."

"Pointers aren't the only thing she gives me."

The Doctor paused, smiled, shook her head and pretended to be more irritated than she actually was, "This is the _one thing_ about you I've never missed; the endless innuendos."

"Ooh, so you've missed me?"

"Do you never stop?"

"If you want me to stop, we'll need a new safe-word."

"Erm," Rose cleared her throat loudly on the balcony above them, crossing her arms and scowling. Neither had noticed her teleport back in, and the Doctor jumped at the intrusion. "Are you two flirting?"

"No!" Thirteen was aghast and took a few steps back from Clara, "I would never flirt! Not with anyone, _ever_!" Clara was amused though and only winked at her before making to return to Rose so she could take them home again.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks," Clara jibed.

"You are so incorrigible, you know!" she argued, forced to follow.

"And yet, you're madly in love with me."

"I'm definitely not in love with you, madly or otherwise."

"You just keep telling yourself that, Doctor," Clara smirked.

"I will!"

"I really do hate you," Rose muttered. "What are we doing about this body?"

"Going to get my wife to call in a favour with UNIT. What did you do with Willard?"

"Drugged him, put him back in his own bed. Suppose he'll be a bit confused about why he's been declared dead, but Oswin said she'll… do something with the death certificates, I don't know. Time to get out of here then?"

The Doctor glanced at Smiles, at Clara, then at Rose, and sighed, "Definitely."


	26. Double Blind - Chapter 6

_Double Blind_

 _6_

Clara almost screamed when she knocked into a tall, shadowy figure in the dark house in the middle of the night. She backed straight into it and an object fell, clattering to the floor and echoing in the large room. The Doctor grabbed her arm and pulled her away.

"Shh," she whispered, but Clara was desperate to know what she had encountered. Squinting, moonlight coming through the large windows – which were surely original Georgian features – her eyes eventually adjusted enough so that she could see what had happened. She wished her eyes had never adjusted, however, because it turned out to be quite horrific: an array of twelve bizarrely dressed mannequins lined the large drawing room in a circle, like points on a clock face. "Oh my _god_ …" the Doctor breathed, "Clara – these are my clothes!"

"I thought we were trying to be quiet?" Clara whispered back. The Doctor turned a glare on her, but her expression melted into one of shock and horror almost immediately. They certainly were her outfits, Clara recognised most of them from files saved on the TARDIS, the foggy memories of her Echoes, and the Doctors she had met. Only one mannequin was incomplete, currently boasting a hooded leather jacket almost identical to the one Thirteen was wearing at that very moment, and a pair of distressed skinny jeans _also_ almost identical to Thirteen. "I think she's really captured your essence." Next to the Twelfth mannequin was the Eleventh Doctor's, one which caused Clara a great deal of sadness to look at; his meticulously recreated tweed jacket and bowtie… she sighed and thumbed her wedding ring, twisting it around her finger.

The Doctor tapped her on the arm and pointed into a corner. Squinting, Clara just managed to see a TARDIS swim into view, stuck in a dusty alcove out of sight and out of mind. Tentatively the Doctor approached, stepping over the object Clara had knocked to the floor – which she now realised was a black umbrella with a red question mark on the end of it. While the Doctor did that, Clara picked up the umbrella.

The doors creaked when she pulled them open, but its interior was empty.

"Is it a replica?" Clara asked quietly.

"No, I think it's an original police box pulled off the street somewhere. Maybe it was in a museum."

"I think this place is a museum. A museum dedicated to you."

"Yeah, well, be sure not to point out how creepy she is to her face. We need her to help us dispose of a body, after all, since there was apparently no way to save his life…" she grumbled. Clara rolled her eyes.

"He literally injected himself with-"

" _I know_ ," she whispered, closing the phone box's door gently, "Hey – I was wondering what happened to that!" she spotted the umbrella and came to take it from Clara, "This is the real deal! I lost it when I regenerated for the seventh time… do you like it? It has a question mark."

"Why?"

"Because! People are always asking me, 'doctor who?'"

"Maybe if you picked a less ridiculous name."

"Well, you're Mrs Doctor Who." Clara was not amused by this.

"Why did you carry an umbrella around with you? Does it do anything?"

"Of course it does things, Clara," said the Doctor, beckoning her closer, then she said very seriously, "It's got this crazy in-built gadget you can use when it rains; it unfolds, and then it stops you getting wet." Clara stared at her. "I know. I couldn't believe it either."

Clara leant towards her then said very quietly, "I hate you so much." To add insult to injury, the Doctor proceeded to open the umbrella in Clara's face, making her stagger backwards. "Why did you do that!?" she almost shouted, while the Doctor laughed.

"You're too easy, Coo," she said, closing it again.

"That's bad luck, you know, opening an umbrella indoors."

"You people have such adorable superstitions, honestly. But I'm keeping this. It's mine, after all. It's got my trademark smell."

"Don't know _what_ that means…"

"You don't think I have a smell?"

"You do now, but I've never met the Seventh Doctor. And I'm not smelling your umbrella. Look, let's just find her bedroom, persuade her to help us, and get out of here."

"You're no fun. You don't want to explore the house of my number one fan?"

"I don't."

"Look at _this_ …" the Doctor spotted yet another collection, a table with a row of devices on it. One of them she picked up and examined in the moonlight, "I broke this the day I met Martha. I was trying to stop a plasmavore and she had these slab drones, had to kill it with roentgen radiation. Burned up the sonic in the machine because I had to increase it so much… I guess she… found it? Would it be rude if I take this, too?"

"And do what with it? Isn't it broken?"

"I don't know – I could give it to Mattie. I told you, it was the day I met her mother. And I saved both our lives with it. Without this little guy, there's a possibility Matts wouldn't be here," she said. Clara thought she was finding a very weak reason to take it. She put it behind her ear like it was a pencil. "C'mon."

They left the mannequin room, the first room they'd stumbled across after phasing through the wall into the isolated country manor Petronella Osgood apparently occupied (having to park the TARDIS far enough away that she wouldn't hear them coming), to find a big hallway. The staircase was lined of photos, which Clara quickly realised were random sightings of the Doctor over the years, framed and mounted; there were none of Thirteen so far, but a fair few of the others, where they had snuck into family photos, important historical moments, UFO sightings – the works.

" _So_ creepy…" murmured Clara.

"Our house is also full of photos of me," she began to ascend the staircase.

"Yeah, because you live there, and we're married."

"I think you're being too harsh on her."

"We'll see who's being harsh when she cuts off your skin and wears it," Clara grumbled, then she said even quieter, "It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again."

"You're so inappropriate. First of all, that movie is a terrible portrayal of trans people, second of all… well, second of all, it's ick."

"I like Jodie Foster."

"Of course you do…"

"I bet she has a well in the cellar."

"Who? Jodie Foster?"

" _No_. Osgood. Also, is that her real name she was born with? It's just, my name's Os _wald_. And she's obsessed with you."

"Oh my god," the Doctor breathed, "You think maybe she changed her name to a name that slightly resembles the name of the wife she didn't know I had until two weeks ago?"

"Shut _up_. You're too sarcastic."

"No, I get it now – _everything_ is connected. I can see the code." On the landing, they stopped talking and glanced around; which bedroom was Osgood in? The house was very large, there were numerous doors, and no indication of where each one led. Seeing that one of them had a sign on it saying 'toilet', which must be to stop all those many guests she had getting lost in her massive house, Clara took a gamble and headed for the door that was closest to the toilet.

Sadly, her gamble didn't pay off. Instead of a bedroom, she found herself met with a room that was entirely a wardrobe, full of clothes _all_ modelled off the Doctor's many outfits. Including a very tell-tale pair of limited edition, stars and stripes Converse, stripes on the outside and stars on the tongue. They were identical to the pair the Doctor was wearing at that very moment, albeit a lot cleaner.

"How has she got all this stuff together in two weeks?" Thirteen asked, shaking her head at the shoes. Clara could see replicas of at least three of the Tenth Doctor's pin-striped suits as well as numerous sets of cricket whites, just in different sizes. All made for Osgood. "Where's the originality?"

"You're gonna have to start dressing like an atomic age housewife again," Clara said quietly.

"But it's not your birthday for another two months."

"I just mean, she probably wouldn't copy you then. There's not a dress or a skirt in sight."

"Didn't realise you were such a stickler for archaic gender roles."

"What do you want? You want me to apologise for being attracted to my wife when she wears a dress? Well, sorry, but I've always been a big fan of people who are very explicitly the same gender as me. Not to sound like a degenerate."

"You _are_ a degenerate. Now help me break into this girl's bedroom." She turned to leave, a bit too freaked out by the wardrobe that had copies of perhaps every item of clothing she had ever worn. Osgood's Thirteen outfits were still a work in progress, thankfully.

On their second attempt to invade Osgood's privacy, they struck gold. She was fast asleep, face-down, inky Scek crawling across her skin and fusing itself to her blood vessels, snoring loudly. It was a miracle they hadn't woken her up yet. Somehow, though, the things they found in this woman's house just got stranger. Her duvet cover was a clearly custom-made creation made to look like the TARDIS; deep blue, square windows, St John Ambulance sign, wood panelling – the works. The wallpaper was white but covered in dancing, red question marks, aesthetically similar to the reclaimed umbrella the Doctor was now holding. A long, multi-coloured scarf hung on the back of the door along with pyjamas also drowning in question mark prints. The carpet was black and looked like a starry night sky. It was eclectic, to say the least. The Doctor looked at Osgood carefully, examining her. Clara nudged her.

" _What are you looking at?_ " she almost mouthed, hardly a sound escaping her lips. The Doctor leant over to speak as quietly as possible right in her ear to explain herself.

"She told me she has tattoos of me." Clara frowned and craned her neck, but Osgood was apparently not the type of person to sleep naked.

"Bet she'll take her clothes off if you ask her," Clara whispered, smirking. The Doctor glared at her in the gloom. Clara nodded at the window. "Sleeps with the curtains open. What's that about?"

"Not everybody requires total darkness."

"Are you gonna wake her up?"

"…Well, how?"

"Just make a really loud noise."

" _With what?_ " Clara paused to think, then got an idea and took the Eleventh Doctor's old, faulty sonic screwdriver from her jacket.

"If you sonic the sonic," she said.

"…Cover your ears," the Doctor said, deciding that this was a good enough plan and exchanging her umbrella for the screwdriver. She took out her own sonic – that was, her sonic that she _hadn't_ destroyed in an x-ray machine fifty years ago, her actual sonic screwdriver – and held that one and Eleven's green one end to end. The screeching was deafening even when Clara had been warned about it beforehand, making her flinch and stagger. It alarmed Osgood so much she almost fell out of bed struggling to wake up. As soon as she moved the Doctor stopped the noise, Osgood scrambling to grab her glasses from her bedside table. When she pushed them on and saw them, standing there and judging her, she could only stare.

"Oh my god!" Osgood exclaimed, "It's you!"

"Howdy," said the Doctor, a word she had never said before; it was a shame she didn't have a hat to tip. "Sorry for the intrusion. And the noise." She handed Eleven's screwdriver back to Clara and stashed her own, reclaiming the umbrella and leaning on it like it was a walking stick. It was a strange persona she was projecting. Osgood practically _jumped_ back into her bed to preserve her modesty, which Clara thought was amusing because she wasn't really immodest at all, wearing a silk pyjama set.

"That's my umbrella," she said.

"I, uh, I think you'll find it's _my_ umbrella."

"Well, yes, but – I found it."

"And for that I thank you," said the Doctor, "I've been wondering where it's got to for the last few centuries. This is an odd house you keep."

"I just… I'm a fan… and now you're here! You're in my bedroom!"

"Don't get _too_ excited," Clara muttered. The Doctor looked at her disapprovingly for that comment. "Do you have any lotion?"

"I've got eczema?"

"Course. Eczema. Must need a lot of lotion for that."

"Would you stop? It wasn't funny the first time, and it's not funny now," the Doctor told her off. She rolled her eyes. "This is Clara, by the way. You met her before, but she was a little bit unconscious."

"Hi," said Clara, holding up a hand in a meek wave, "I'm her wife."

"Don't pee on me," the Doctor told her, "Try to be nice. Now, look," she went and sat at the bottom of the bed. It was clearly the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Osgood. "I'd love to say this is just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, three AM social call. But I'm here on business. Sort of. I need a favour."

"From _me_?"

"You're the new Brigadier at UNIT," the Doctor pointed out, "So, yeah, you. Maybe I'll tell you where to get sneakers like these ones that aren't knock-offs."

"What do you need?"

"Prometheus is manufacturing Xboost," Clara said, going to lean on the wall near the Doctor, crossing her arms. "Did you know?"

"No. Xboost isn't UNIT business, it's still being investigated by the police at a local level," she said, "There have been a few parliamentary rumours about relaunching the HCC if it gets much worse though, and others who want to pass responsibility to Prometheus entirely and give Will Smiles more government funding."

"Smiles is dead," said Clara, "He died about an hour ago." And in that hour, they (or rather, Rose) had taken Sally and Esther back to Westminster when Esther was able to be disconnected from the national grid, convinced Dr Cohen to make a house call to the ancestral Sparrow residence and tend to Jenny's latest slew of injuries, and used the Astro TARDIS to find out where Osgood lived and sneak in. "He's been manufacturing Xboost, using what are essentially hit-squads to forcibly inject people with it, violently killing them to trigger the adrenaline rush to activate their powers, and then paying off coroners to remove their brains and hand them over to him. He's been using the brains to try and develop drugs that will give people specific superpowers, so then he can start selling superpowers for profit. He's also been trying to sabotage CyTech rain machines and almost killed the Lightning Girl."

"Is she okay?" Osgood asked.

"She'll be fine," added the Doctor.

"How did he die?"

"Injected himself with a serum that gave him every superpower he'd stolen from dead Manifests at once combined with three times the fatal dose of adrenaline. His heart exploded. He's in a secret lab now, in a skyscraper in London's financial district."

"Yeah, so, here's the favour," the Doctor said, "It would be a super-awesome thing to do if you could, like, get the red berets in there to clear out all this equipment to create Xboost and make sure nobody _ever_ has access to the technology again. We were told by a solid source that we can trust you, even if you do have that… thing…"

"Splodge?"

"Mm."

"We can't go to the police about it because Smiles has been bankrolling them for months."

"And we can get you cures for the uncorrupted strain of the Manifest virus to close down the M.O.C.s," the Doctor said, "Won't it reflect well on UNIT to solve the mystery of where and why Xboost was being manufactured, prevent a second Manifest Crisis before it has the chance to really start, and really stick it to big pharma?"

"Just so long as we can trust you not to start any nasty UNIT experiments with the Xboost or any other Manifest serum," Clara added, "That's the whole reason why we're coming to you at all and not releasing this all to journalists and posing as whistle-blowers."

"Yes, of course I'll make sure all the Xboost is destroyed," she said, "Is there evidence for everything you're saying? Of paying off the police, these murders?"

"Well, the people die, and their deaths are ruled accidental, but the post-mortems are inconsistent with what any moron knows are violent murders," said the Doctor, "If you get the medical reports, incident reports, death certificates, and then exhume the bodies, you should be able to get all the evidence you need."

She nodded, "Alright… why was he doing it? Smiles?"

"Money and power," said Clara, "And out of spite for Adam Mitchell. You know, because Adam's a Manifest and an actual, good person." She didn't want to say much else about Adam because she didn't think it was a great idea for UNIT's leader to find out that they were related to the CEO of CyTech. They were still trying to keep her in the dark about the fact they were living on Earth and not on the TARDIS. They might pay _her_ some highly impromptu house calls, but it wasn't a privilege Clara wanted to be reciprocated.

"Alright. I'll go after Prometheus for you," she nodded, "I'll make sure people know the truth about what happened, and I'll make sure nobody can ever make more Manifests. But I need something in return." Clara crossed her fingers and hoped desperately Osgood wasn't going to request a date with the Doctor, or something equally unbearable. "I need a way to contact you. A phone number."

"Sure thing! Coo, would you get her the TARDIS phone number?" Phone calls to the TARDIS were often routed to the intertemporal phone in their living room, though the number was the same and was completely untraceable.

"Do you have a pen and paper?" Clara asked her. The Doctor fumbled around in the pockets of her hoodie for a moment – the same one Clara had found a rare Pokémon card in some hours previously – until she drew out a small notepad with a very tiny pen wedged in its rings. "Why do you carry this? What's it for?"

"Just reminders." Clara scribbled down the number for the TARDIS, which she had learnt off by heart a very long time ago because the Doctor was constantly forgetting it, then tore off the page and handed it to Osgood. She took it and stared at it like it was the most precious thing in the world. "Don't be calling that all the time with any old minor, alien-related problem. You don't want to be the boy who cried wolf." She nodded, in awe. "So, um, what's with the clothes? Not that I don't appreciate the meticulous attention to detail, but do you have any clothes that _aren't_ just replicas of _my_ clothes?"

"You have a great sense of style."

Clara suddenly snorted and then began to cough. The Doctor glared at her.

"S-sorry," she said, still pretending to cough, "Just a frog in my throat… that's all… please, continue…"

"Are you mocking my dress sense now, Oswald?" the Doctor asked.

"Oswald?" asked Osgood, surprised, "Is that your name?"

"Clara Oswald. Yes. My sister's name is Oswin."

"I guess that makes me the Wizard of Oz, or something. Look, we can't stick around for much longer," said the Doctor, "As much fun as name etymology is to discuss – and obviously, it's riveting – so are you sure you're going to be able to handle everything with Prometheus for us? For me?" Clara rolled her eyes.

"Yes, of course, absolutely, my pleasure," Osgood babbled, "I have an engineering question, though, before you go."

"Shoot."

"Can you double-check my equations for this black hole generator I'm building?"

"I will in fact not be doing that, and instead advise you to not try to build a black hole generator at all or anything else that could be used as a WMD if it falls into the wrong hands. If that's everything-?" she got up to leave.

"Can you tell me how to build a TARDIS?"

"We actually grow them out of coral. You couldn't really build one, and definitely not using Earth materials. Like I said, we really need to bounce, so-"

"What about the screwdrivers? How do you make them, how many features and settings do they have?"

The Doctor clenched her jaw, trying to hide that she was getting a bit annoyed, "It's complicated, and they don't work on wood. If we could just-"

"Do you marry very many of the people you travel with?"

"I really try not to make a habit of it. Is that everything now? Because we need to-"

"Will humans ever go extinct?"

"God, I hope so."

"How many colours can you see?"

"Six. But I'm leaving now, that's enough questions," she took Clara's hand and pulled her through the door.

"What's the meaning of life!?" Osgood shouted after them.

"I don't know, uh – eat five portions of fruit and veg a day! Going now!"

"Nice speaking to you!" Clara called as they fled down the stairs. Jumping the last few steps, Clara phased them straight through the front door and they escaped Osgood's stifling museum of a home into the open countryside of her large grounds. No doubt she was going to watch them leave through the windows since all the curtains were wide open. "And we didn't even get to see her tattoos."

"I know – maybe you should've been nicer," said the Doctor, "You can charm the skin off a snake when you bring your A-game. Could've definitely got her to take her clothes off."

"Thank you for acknowledging my many talents," said Clara. The TARDIS was hidden in the trees at the edge of the estate, not far now. They could just about see its shadowy shape coming into view. "Can you really see six colours?"

"Yeah."

"What colour are my eyes, then?"

The Doctor stopped walking and looked at her, "They're brown, Clara." Clara was annoyed by that. "I'm surprised you don't know what colour your eyes are, given how much time you spend ogling your own reflection."

"I don't know why I put up with you. I should dump you and let _Petronella_ back there have her way. Who knows where your screwdrivers have been?"

"You are too inappropriate for your own good."

"I'm being serious."

"Uh-huh, uh-huh; don't talk to me," she said as they came upon the TARDIS.

"Do you think she dresses up as you during sex?"

" _Clara_ …"

"Do you think she does roleplay?"

"I'm warning you, if you don't stop trying to get on my nerves, I'll-"

"You'll what?" Clara challenged, smirking, crossing her arms.

As soon as the Doctor began to respond, the TARDIS doors creaked open and Yaz stuck her head out.

"Are you gonna stand out there all day?"

"We could sit down?" Clara suggested.

"Urgh! I cannot stand you today," the Doctor shook her head and entered the Astro TARDIS, which Clara thought looked like the inside of a salt lamp with all the big, amber crystals.

"Did something bad happen?" Yaz asked Clara seriously, stopping her at the door.

"No, why?"

"She sounds like she's in a bad mood."

"No, she just says things like that," said Clara, "She's really into me."

"I can hear you, and I'm not," said the Doctor.

"Did you get everything sorted out, then?" the Astro Doctor jumped to her feet; she'd been down tinkering with some part of the console. "Ooh, is that our old umbrella?" Cosmic Thirteen held up the question mark umbrella so that she could see it.

"Apparently so. And yeah, everything's sorted. Unless she double-crosses us and decides to make a bunch of UNIT super-soldiers, which… well, I hope she won't do that… So!" she tapped the umbrella on the floor, "I guess since Jenny and Esther are being looked after in London, Rose is watching Mattie, Willard's been retconned and had the record of his death erased, the Second Manifest Crisis has been dealt with, and Prometheus is about to be exposed, that's everything."

"Right, well," began the Astro Doctor, "I suppose we'd… best head off, then?"

"Could you drop us home first?" Clara asked.

"Oh! Yes, great, I'll do that now," she went around the console flicking switches, smashing buttons and pulling levers. The central column began to move up and down, the TARDIS thrumming in its usual way as it took off.

"Is that a microphone!?" the Cosmic Doctor spied an old-fashioned chrome microphone resting on the console and gravitated towards it, "How did I never think of putting a microphone in the console room?" She lifted it from its holder.

"What would you do with a microphone?" Clara asked her incredulously.

"I could sing to you?" she suggested, then cleared her throat, " _Baby, I'm yours_ …" Clara shook her head, " _And I'll be yours, until the stars fall from the sky_ -" The TARDIS jerked aggressively as it took off and she nearly tripped over and nearly dropped the mic.

"Sorry about that!" apologised the Astro Doctor, "Navigation's a bit sticky. You know how parallel universes are."

"See?" Clara said to Yaz, "I told you she's not mad at me."

"So, what's this about a house in Westminster? I thought Sally Sparrow hasn't got any money," the Astro Doctor asked.

"It's an Edwardian townhouse she inherited when her parents died," Clara explained.

"That's the rich for you," the Cosmic Doctor complained, "Get everything handed to them."

"Well, anyway," Clara ignored that, "She lived with Esther in Yorkshire for a while to get over a nasty breakup – dumped at the altar – and moved back to London the same time Jenny and Ravenwood moved down there. The four of them are close. They just moved into Sally's house she already owned."

"Edwardian townhouse in Westminster…" the Doctor said quietly to herself, pulling another lever. Clara frowned.

"Why do you ask?"

She looked up and smiled, "Just didn't realise she was so posh, that's all." It was a short trip. The TARDIS landed abruptly, making them wobble a little, but they were all seasoned time travellers who were used to the TARDIS's bumpiness. "I think this is your stop." The Cosmic Doctor went to open the doors and peek out; their living room was visible through the crack in the door.

"Well, it was nice to meet you all," Clara said, smiling, "Have to say I like this regeneration much more than your last one."

"So do I," said the Astro Doctor, "Apart from the sexism."

"Tell me about it," said the Cosmic Doctor.

"Yeah, nice to meet you lot, as well," said Graham. Yaz and Ryan both smiled and echoed the sentiments. "Never thought I'd see the Doc settled down somewhere."

"You're always welcome if you happen to find yourself knocking around in this universe," Clara offered, "Honestly, just drop by whenever."

"Might have had enough parallel universe travel for the moment, but thanks," said the Astro Doctor. Clara and her Doctor waved over their shoulders as they stepped out of the TARDIS and back into their house, the doors swinging shut on them. Right away, the Astro Doctor set the TARDIS off again, the column thrumming up and down, taking them back into flight. "Where do you want to go next, then?"

"You want to go somewhere else _now_?" Yaz asked, "I'm knackered. It's three in the morning."

"Yeah, well, just wondered if anybody wanted to pull an all-nighter."

Yaz laughed, "No way. It's been a weird enough day."

"Yeah," Ryan agreed, "Meeting your two, parallel universe wives. Finding out about superpowers. Going grave-robbing."

"I suppose when you put it that way," she laughed awkwardly, "Off to bed, then? The three of you?"

"I think we should call it a night," Graham agreed with the other two.

She nodded again, "Course, course… I've got some repairs to finish up in here, so I'll just hang about."

"I don't know how you're always repairing the TARDIS," said Yaz, "Does it break that often?"

"Just needs tweaking every now and then; she's a complicated piece of machinery," the Doctor defended herself, "Go on, get yourselves to sleep. I'll be fine here until the morning as long as I don't bore myself to death." They bade her goodnight and then slipped away out of the console room and into the hallways. Waiting for them to be completely out of earshot, she leant on the console itself, thinking.

The Doctor waited for at least fifteen minutes to check they weren't going to come back to talk to her about this or that, and it was possibly the only time she wouldn't welcome their company.

"Edwardian townhouse in Westminster… Edwardian townhouse in Westminster…" she said quietly to herself. An Edwardian townhouse in Westminster currently draining the national grid of every last bit of juice it had in order to get the all-powerful Lightning Girl back on her feet… it didn't take her long to discover just which house this was, especially when it already had more than a few traces of artron and temporal energy. Certainly a popular rendezvous spot for time travellers. Concentrating her hardest, she navigated the TARDIS as precisely as she could, aiming for the house's attic.

Her diligence paid off. The TARDIS landed and she tentatively stepped out, trying not to think too hard about what she was doing lest she start to regret it. She had made it into the attic. Moonlight managed to sneak in around the edges of thick, heavy curtains; the ceiling hung low and the air was thick with dust. Pieces of furniture covered in sheets were wedged in there. It was certainly a home fit for someone nicknamed 'Spooky Sally.'

The TARDIS hummed behind her as she looked around, trying to deduce what ambiguous shape was what object. She was somewhat curious about this archive of vampire artefacts, but the attic obviously wasn't the place where they were keeping it. It also wasn't the real reason she was there. The Doctor peered into a musty cardboard box and found an array of carefully labelled photo albums. They were labelled by date ranges, and when she searched through the first one she saw it was almost entirely grainy photos with times, dates and places underneath. One had a very eerie, blurry shape in the centre of it the Doctor had to squint at, but she couldn't work out what it was. Eventually, she realised it was little more than a collection of Sally Sparrow's many ghost sightings caught on camera, but failed to see actual ghosts in any of the prints.

What was she doing there? What was she hoping to achieve? Maybe all she was doing was poring through old photos trying to capture something, get it on film so that she could understand what she'd lost… She closed the album, having second thoughts about the entire venture, gamble, escapade. She hadn't thought it through at all – didn't even have an excuse ready for when somebody inevitably came to investigate the sound of the TARDIS arriving a few floors above. She turned on her heel to leave, dropping the photo album back in the box, but didn't get the opportunity.

Clara Ravenwood was leaning against the doorframe, ghostly pale in what little moonlight could breach the curtains, and when the Doctor looked up and saw her she froze. Clara watched her with cold, black eyes and an unreadable expression. The vampiric traces in her appearance would make it possible to tell her apart from the other one if they were side-by-side, and she no longer looked like the impeccable memory the Doctor could recall. For once, the Doctor was at a loss for words.

"And here I thought you were going to leave without saying goodbye," said Clara coolly.

"I haven't even really had a chance to say hello."

"Mm," Clara crossed her arms and looked at the floor uneasily, "I think you forgot to do that while you were shouting at me." The Doctor felt a little guilty and paused for a while before saying anything else.

"…Thought you were dead," she tried to smile, acting like this was all a very funny misunderstanding – just the sort of scrape she was always getting into.

"I am dead."

"Dead-dead, I mean. Gone."

"It's semantics," Clara said quietly. Again, the Doctor lapsed into silence and Clara continued to look anywhere in the room _except_ at Thirteen. "…Where are your friends, then?"

"I sent them to bed," the Doctor admitted, "Told them I'm doing boring TARDIS repairs."

"Course," she nodded, "Subterfuge."

"No, not – I'm not-"

"Not what? Sneaking around?" Clara challenged, meeting her gaze. But the Doctor couldn't hold it. "You probably shouldn't be here. Which I'm sure you know since you're lying to people." Clara was right.

The Doctor paused for a long time, her arms hanging uselessly by her side. "I missed you."

"I…" Clara scoffed and shook her head, "What do you want me to say to that?"

"I don't know."

"Then why say it?"

"Because it's true?" she said unsurely. Not unsure that it was true, but that Clara, now growing visibly frustrated, wanted to hear anything she had to say.

"What are you doing here?"

"How's Jenny?" the Doctor asked suddenly, seizing the first idea she had for an actual topic, though it obviously took Clara by surprise, "I was just wondering. Thought I'd stop by. Give her some…" she stopped to search in her coat pockets and found a half-eaten packet of Starbursts. "Starbursts. Got them for her specially."

"So special you already ate most of them," said Clara.

"Well, I…"

"Put them away, along with the rest of your excuses."

"Do you want one…?"

"No."

"Right…" she put them away again, "How is Jenny, though?"

"She'll be fine. She's got three broken ribs, a broken arm, and some bruising. Cohen's ordered her to take some time away from the TARDIS and given her some painkillers; she's asleep downstairs in one of the spare rooms at the moment."

The Doctor nodded, thinking. "Who's Cohen?"

"Nios's girlfriend, she's a pathologist. Or was, she's retired, but Jenny keeps her busy throwing herself into danger."

"Nios the synth? She's still around?" The Doctor was pleasantly surprised – Nios the mass-murdering synthetic in a long-term relationship with a human.

"She has Oswin to keep her up and running."

"Good for Nios, I suppose. What about Esther? Is she 'recharged'?"

"She's fine, managed to take her costume off finally. She's sleeping, too."

"And Sally?" She continued to list everybody she'd run into that day in the hope of keeping the conversation going, finding something Clara was willing to talk about.

"Lurking in the cellar. I was just with Jenny. Cohen's gone home with Nios."

"It's just us, then."

"And you're surprised about that? Sneaking in here in the middle of the night? I'm supposed to believe you weren't _trying_ to get me alone?"

"I just wanted to talk to you without a dozen other people all sticking their beaks in," she said. "It's not like I could call ahead. Obviously."

"Talk about what?" Clara asked carefully.

The Doctor stopped and started her next sentence more than a few times, not sure how to word it best, until blurting out, "Why were you sleeping with her behind my back?" Clara said nothing. "I mean, you didn't trust me? You couldn't have told me?"

"How would I have brought that up? 'By the way, I've got a new friend with benefits and, oh yeah, _it's also your daughter_.' You were… _difficult_ back then, and you've never been a huge fan of casual sex, like, _at all_."

"If you were _happy_ , I would have-"

"I wasn't happy," she interrupted, then waited before continuing, "Why do you think I was doing it? It was completely self-destructive, and she was doing it for a bet to piss off her toxic husband at the time."

"But… you're married now? The two of you?"

"I fell in love with her. She had enough of Jack and dumped him. I died, I came back as a vampire, I didn't remember a thing, my whole life was over, I had to change my name and go into hiding, and do you know who was there for me the whole way through? Do you know who's still there for me now? Jenny. And the thing about all those bad things and losing absolutely _everything_ to the point where I'm not even allowed to be in the same universe, is that it really puts stuff into perspective. So I told her I loved her, and we've been together ever since. Six years after that, I proposed to her. _Me_ , _I_ proposed. Two years after _that_ we were married. And I have to wear a wedding ring made out of wood because precious metals burn me." She held up her hand to show the Doctor a dark, glossy ring, polished and shiny. "Jenny's never been too scared to tell me how she feels."

"Don't say something like that."

"Why not? You've met them. They're in love, they're married, they're _us_. They're me and you. In all the time we were – I could never tell you that I… how would you have reacted?"

"I don't know."

"And what's funny," her voice shook, "Is that now I don't need to tell you anything at all, because of them. There are no secrets, there's no room for denial, even from you. Because I know that Eleven-" She cut herself off and changed where she was going. "Not that there's a point to any of this anymore. It all looks stupid now."

"It's not stupid."

"Is that why you're here? Is it? You've – what? Had a few hundred years to think things through, and now you're ready for-"

"No!" she was aghast, "No, of course not! I would never _dream_ of doing something that would make you unhappy."

"And yet here we are. The hybrid."

"I'm not convinced that prophecy really is about us…"

"So, I died for nothing?"

"You didn't die because of that."

"Why did I die, then? I still don't know the whole story.."

"We went to see Rigsy. He had a tattoo counting down, a chronolock, and when it reached zero Ashildr's pet Quantum Shade would come out and kill him as punishment for a murder he couldn't remember. You didn't want to let that happen, so you took the chronolock away from him. The Shade killed you."

"It was Ashildr's fault?"

"In a roundabout way."

"Maybe that's why she's never properly told me…"

"And then I couldn't bear it, so I took you out of a fixed point in time and you were a bit… frozen. Stuck between heartbeats. I ended up wiping my own memory of all trace of you, and you went off with Ashildr. When I regenerated I remembered. I suppose if you were stuck, and now you're un-stuck, it makes sense for the memories to have never actually formed."

"She says I travelled with her in a TARDIS for ten years and we were apparently dating, but I'm still not sure whether I believe her. She's sort of, friends with Jenny now," she frowned when she recalled this. They were still keeping their distance, standing at odds a few feet apart.

"You said she stabbed Jenny earlier."

"No, she did do that too, and they fight a _lot_."

"Over you?"

"No, just for fun, I suppose… Thanks for telling me. It's been a bit strange not knowing how I died all this time."

"No problem…" There was another long lapse between them. "You live on the TARDIS full-time now, then? Something you never wanted to do with me."

"We've lived in lots of places. We even lived in the Wild West for a bit. And it's been good for Jenny to be trusted with the ship. You don't know what she and the other Doctor have been through to repair their relationship."

"No, I don't," she sighed. "I'm glad you're alright, though. And you're happy. And you're making Jenny happy. Even if the Great Vampires are the sworn enemies of the Time Lords."

"Well, Sally and I don't spend too much time with other vampires. We do sometimes have to go cover up their messes, though, but the ones we meet don't really like us. Probably because we drink synthetic blood and don't kill indiscriminately. Or kill at all. I've never killed anybody, not for blood or any other reason, and neither's Sally. You know, she was actually the maid of honour at my wedding. If only I'd known that you remembered who I was…"

"Did she do a good job?"

"She didn't have much to do, it was small and she didn't have to make a toast. Of course, Eleven was there to make a father-of-the-other-bride speech, not to mention _my_ dad."

"Doesn't Dave think you're dead?"

"Um… we went and told him it was a witness protection thing…" Clara admitted, "I couldn't just leave him like that, thinking I'm… he and Sally were literally the only people on my side of the wedding."

"Sorry I missed it."

"You weren't invited," Clara made a small joke.

"Did she take your name? New name, I should say."

"It's mum's name," said Clara. The Doctor had remembered that. "And yeah, she did, but she changes her name constantly. She's Jenny Ravenwood now."

"The Other Doctor's taken your name, too. Dr Oswald."

"Mm, Clara thinks it's unbearable; we've never liked 'Oswald' much. What's funny is Oswin's apparently never minded it, she hasn't changed her name to 'Oswin Mitchell.'"

"Things are different in the future."

"Yeah. They Are.

The Doctor smiled a little, more to herself, but wanted to talk about something other than Clara's wedding. At least things were starting to thaw.

"What's this vampire archive, then?" She crossed her arms as she got to the thing that was _really_ intriguing her.

"The Gutkeled Archive?" The Doctor nodded. "It's just paraphernalia, it's more Sally's thing. She likes archives and collections." Thirteen glanced at the box full of meticulously recorded ghost photos with this in mind.

"What do you do with it?"

"Keep it away from other vampires, mostly. A lot of these ancient texts have things in them about turning everyone else into vampires – they've proven persuasive in the past. Some fledgeling will find them and then go around biting as many people as they can, it all gets a bit messy, so… and because Sally just gets bored, especially now with Esther always away." The Doctor nodded, thinking. "I'm not taking you downstairs to see it if that's what you're after. I'm not having Sally find out you're up here lurking; I'd have to swear her to silence, and she hates it when I do that." The Doctor made a face, annoyed. She did want to see the Archive. "What did you do after I died, then? Get yourself killed and regenerate?" Clara clearly wanted to talk about something else. The Doctor, knowing how stubborn she could be, relented.

"Not right away. I was with Bill for a while. Have you met Bill, over here?"

"Don't think so."

"You would've loved her. She's a lesbian, and completely hilarious, honestly. Always called me out when I was being 'difficult,' as you said. Left me because she met a girl."

"She fared better than most," Clara quipped, "Maybe I'll go look for her in this universe, she sounds like fun."

"The girl, Heather – she can turn into a sentient puddle and travel through time. They both can now, actually. Maybe they'll end up here."

"Um, what? Did you say sentient puddle?"

"More of an oil."

"…What?"

"A puddle of oil."

"…Sorry, what do you mean when you say, 'she can turn into a sentient puddle and travel through time'?"

"That she can turn into a sentient puddle and also travel through time."

"I don't follow."

"It's not that complicated. She can turn into a sentient puddle able to travel through time." Clara opened her mouth again to question this entire concept, but the Doctor interrupted. " _You_ can turn into a bat."

"…Point taken..."

"I'd rather be a sentient puddle than a vampire."

"Apparently sentient puddles get all the girls, so," Clara joked.

"Did you know about Osgood?" she changed the subject once more, "Being the leader of UNIT?"

"I did. I find it deeply troubling. I heard she has tattoos of your face in this universe."

"And nothing to do with Zygons."

"Well, could you imagine if there were two of them here? That's twice as many tattoos of your face. I feel like it's only a natural progression if she cuts off your skin and wears it next. _It puts the lotion_ -"

"Don't start with that," the Doctor told her off. "You know that film has transphobic overtones?"

"Mm, but it's got Jodie Foster in it. So, um, how'd you meet this lot?"

"Fell through the roof of a train, and there they were."

"Wow. That's so much simpler than me."

"I suppose. But you're still…" she didn't finish her sentence. "They're good. They're nice. They're my best friends."

"Glad to see you've gotten over me."

The Doctor thought for a long time, fidgeting, before bringing up something else that had been on her mind for the last few hours since Smiles' demise. "The other Clara told me not to ask you to come back on the TARDIS."

"She's right. Don't ask me that," Clara's tone became serious again.

"Is that because you'd say no or because you'd say yes?"

"Just don't. Don't come here and even _entertain_ the possibility of trying to convince me to uproot my life, for you," Clara argued with her. "I'll say no. But it will make me think less of you."

"I wouldn't ask." She didn't know if she was telling the truth. "You've got your own TARDIS. And like you said, someone who'll tell you outright how much you mean to them. You should probably get back to her, in case she wakes up and comes looking for you."

"You're right. I should." Clara looked at her expectantly, waiting.

"And I'll… go?"

"Yeah."

"It was nice to see you. To find out where you are, what you've been up to."

"And it was nice to find out how I died. Although, that's probably the weirdest sentence I've ever said."

"I am glad that you're happy," she said as she approached the TARDIS, "And maybe the thing with Jenny isn't as weird as it seems at first glance. She is a lot like me, after all." That was a risky joke, but Clara at least found the humour in it, trying to hide her smile.

"Goodbye, Doctor," she said, "I'm sure we'll run into each other again someday. Now you know where I am, you could even visit on purpose, stay long enough to have a cup of tea. See if Sally will let you see her crap."

"I hope we will, and maybe – I'm intrigued by this collection, and I know you always make a brilliant cup of tea." Clara smiled. The TARDIS doors creaked familiarly when she pushed them open, bidding Clara Ravenwood, née Oswald, farewell.

"Bye, Doctor."

"Goodbye, Clara."

Ravenwood stepped back from the blue box and crossed her arms tightly, steeling herself as it began to warp away, fading in and out until it had finally disappeared. The attic grew dark, and her Doctor was gone.

For now.

 **AN: While it might seem a bit random and unnecessary to just throw Jenny and Ravenwood in there at the end, I did it for two reasons: 1) because I didn't feel like this crossover would be complete without Ravenwood and the Other Doctor reuniting in some way and I think them having an honest conversation gives important closure, and 2) because it's here to set up Jenny's role in the next storyline since she's going to stay with Clarteen for a while to recover from her injuries.**

 **I would love to do another crossover with different characters there because I think it's a shame they didn't get to meet Oswin and only the Doctor saw Jenny, but I have no idea if I'll be able to find the opportunity.**


	27. Vive la Révolution - Chapter 1

_Vive la Révolution_

 _1_

Clara dropped a heavy binder on one of the tables in the staff room harder than she intended, making the Doctor – already sitting down with her head buried in notes and books – jump.

"Sorry, didn't realise it was that heavy."

"You've got that old copy of _Les Mis_ wedged in there, of course it's heavy," the Doctor pointed out. She'd been trying to get through it for weeks but had forgotten she was carrying it around with her. "Lemme have a look at it, I need to check something."

"Be my guest," said Clara, handing it to her. It was a very old edition printed at some point in the 1970s, which made it nearly a hundred now, and had originally belonged to her mother. When Clara had moved out to study literature she had taken it with her, along with a few dozen others, and had made sure to keep track of it. Of course, the Doctor had tens of different versions of every novel ever printed in the TARDIS library, but Clara had spent most of her life trying to build a library of her own. Many of the books in their house belonged to her.

It was the fifth period of the day on a Thursday, one of the very few free periods they had at the same time, and they usually spent it in the staff room. This was primarily because Clara's office only had one desk, and it wasn't large enough for them both to work at it. The second, smaller reason was that if they spent too much time lurking in her office they would be accused of being antisocial, or up to no good, mostly by Sarah Pickman.

Leaving her things under the watchful eye of her wife, Clara went into the kitchen to try and find something to drink in the fridge. She was very surprised to discover a modest cake in there with only a covering of simple, white fondant, in a plastic container. There was a card on top of it, but Clara assumed it was just a gift for somebody else, perhaps a member of the faculty was having a birthday, and she certainly wasn't in the habit of stealing food from her colleagues. Her attention was supplanted by two cans of pop she'd bought at lunch, both Tizer because it had been on offer, which she took out.

By the time she got back to the table Sarah had made her appearance, also sharing the same free lesson, and had taken the seat on the Doctor's other side. Apart from them, the staff room was sparsely populated.

"I've read that ten times," Sarah nodded at _Les Mis_.

"Really? I think it's unbearable," Clara said as she sat back down.

"It's better in French," she said quite pompously. Clara didn't quite believe that Sarah had read _Les Mis_ in its entirety in French, she barely believed that she'd read it in English. She could just about imagine Sarah buying a fancy edition of it and putting it on a shelf in her front room for people to see. The Doctor made an irritated sound.

"I thought so…" she muttered.

"What?" asked Clara.

"I'm trying to revise my knowledge of the French Revolution, but this is set way too late." She closed it and set it back down on top of Clara's folder. "Why are you reading it?"

"I don't know," she shrugged, "It's been a long time. Why are _you_ doing all this research into the Revolution?"

"I know _all_ about the French Revolution," said Sarah.

"You do?" the Doctor asked.

"Well, it's not _that_ complicated."

"I'd be inclined to disagree."

"The people didn't like the monarchy, so they cut their heads off. End of story," said Sarah, "That's all you need to know." Even Clara, who had very limited knowledge of French history because she didn't find much about France particularly interesting (that was her Englishness coming out), knew it was much more nuanced than that.

"Okay, well, Year 12 coursework next term is covering the history of France from the Storming of the Bastille to the establishment of the Third French Republic," said the Doctor, "And while I might have a soft spot for French history, I have to revise my knowledge if I have to, you know, actually teach it to anybody…" Again, she picked up Clara's book. "Do you have notes in here?"

"Not many," she said, though most of the pages did have passages underlined or a few scrawled remarks. But it wasn't as bad as the volume of notes she wrote in books she enjoyed a great deal. "I don't know what you think my notes add to a reading experience, to be honest," she cracked open her can of pop.

"I love reading your notes, Coo," said the Doctor, flicking through the pages, "This one right here where you've written 'Fantine' surrounded by hearts and a sad face. The depth is extraordinary."

"I think that sums up my feelings about Fantine quite well," said Clara.

"Fair enough, I guess."

"I think the whole thing sounds horrible," said Sarah eventually, "The Revolution. I can't imagine how scared those people must have been heading to the guillotine."

"Well, if you're gonna exploit the poor…" the Doctor began.

"Really? You think they deserved to be executed?"

"I didn't say _that_ ," she said, though she may as well have.

"What was their crime? Apart from being born rich?"

"…Do you want a list, or-?" But Sarah wasn't happy with the Doctor's apparent lack of empathy for French aristocrats who had been sent to the guillotines.

Huffily, Sarah began, "All I know is, if anything like that happened to _my_ Louis and Marie, I don't know how I'd manage."

"Well, I don't think they beheaded a great many cats," said the Doctor, "Not during the Revolution, after the National Convention implemented a bunch of strict animal protection laws. Although, there _was_ that massacre of cats in the Latin Quarter in the 1730s. But they hanged those ones, after trying them for witchcraft."

"Excuse me?" Clara asked.

"Haven't you heard that story? A group of printing apprentices tricked their bosses into thinking their cats were possessed because the bosses were jerks, so the bosses ended up killing all the cats on the Rue Saint-Séverin because of, y'know, demons."

"Is that true?"

"Sure. I've got some photos somewhere." Clara stared at her. "What? _Obviously_ I don't support animal cruelty, but it's the kind of thing you need photo evidence of, or nobody believes you."

"Did they have cameras in the 1730s?" Sarah interrupted.

"I mean… illustrations," she lied, "Not photos. Got mixed up. Like I said, they were printing apprentices, so they printed recreations. But, you know, from a sociological perspective the whole thing was really an attack on womanhood and punished the printer's wife more than him. I guess that's pre-Enlightenment European misogyny for you. Can we get a cat, Coo?"

"What? No," said Clara.

"Oh. So you're saying we can get a _dog_?"

"We're not getting more pets. Captain Nemo is plenty."

"But he's just a lobster, he doesn't do anything."

"Then _why_ did you steal him from that restaurant?" Clara countered sharply, never one to entertain the Doctor's constant pestering her to let them get a dog. The Doctor shut up, irritated, but knowing full-well that Clara was not going to alter her position. She returned to the large volume of 18th century French history she must have found in the school library somewhere, refreshing her memory with the rather corrupt court proceedings of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

"Who's that cake from, anyway?" Sarah interrupted. She apparently didn't want to let them get on with their work, Clara trying to come up with a more effective guideline for essay-style exam responses than the one the department was currently using (a truly riveting activity.)

"What do you mean?" the Doctor asked.

"Clara's cake, in the fridge."

"Sorry?" said Clara, "It's not my cake."

"It's got your name on it, there's a card. Ida brought it here, she said it was delivered to reception during lunch and you weren't in your office." She and the Doctor had gone out to a café for dinner that day. "She wasn't happy about it." Clara was taken aback; why would anybody have a cake delivered to the school for her? "Is it your birthday?"

"Not until the end of next month. Are you sure it's for me? Maybe it's for her," she nodded at her wife.

"Surely that's equally weird," said the Doctor, " _I'm_ not expecting a cake."

"I said it has a card with it," Sarah repeated. Clara was perplexed and returned to the fridge, the Doctor and Sarah both observing her this time. She pulled out the circular cake and lifted the card stuck to the top. It was emblazoned with exceptionally neat, calligraphic writing, but the words were in French.

"It's in French," said Clara, unable to hide her confusion, "It must be for somebody else. I can't even speak French, and there's no surname."

"What does it say?" asked the Doctor.

"' _À ma chérie Clara, qu'ils mangent de la brioche_ ,'" she read it as best she could. "What does that mean?"

"'To my darling Clara, let them eat cake,'" translated the Doctor.

"Is it from you?" Clara asked.

" _Me_? No. If I was gonna bake you a cake, I wouldn't send it to the school with a weird note."

"I'm the French teacher here," said Sarah indignantly, "I could have translated it."

"I _do_ speak French, too," the Doctor retorted. She spoke every language, like Jenny. And that was a thought that piqued Clara's interest.

"Maybe it's from Jenny," she said, putting the note and the cake away again because she found the whole thing quite strange. "She hasn't stopped baking at all for the last two weeks she's been staying with us." Jenny was still convalescing after her altercation with Will Smiles by order of Oswin, who didn't want her running amok on the TARDIS with half a dozen broken bones. She had bided her time producing an innumerable supply of baked goods for them.

"Maybe," said the Doctor, though she didn't sound convinced. Nor was Clara, since she couldn't think why Jenny would address her as 'my darling,' or write in French. She thought it more likely that the Doctor _had_ baked it and suffered a bout of amnesia, making her forget what she'd done completely. "Or it could be for a student."

"There is a girl called Clara in Year 10," Sarah said.

"Oh, true," Clara nodded, "Would someone send her a cake with a French note?"

"She likes French?" Sarah offered.

"That's probably what it is, then," said Clara, returning to her seat at the table, "Occam's razor, and all that."

"What an exciting mystery we've solved," said the Doctor dryly.

"I wonder who sent it," Sarah mused, "Someone clever enough to quote Marie Antoinette."

"She never actually said, 'let them eat cake,'" said the Doctor, "It's a misattributed quote. Some would say mistranslated, too."

"What are you talking about? Of course she did. Marie Antoinette said, 'let them eat cake.' Everyone knows that," Sarah scoffed, "I think I know a bit more about France than you do."

"She wasn't even French, she was from Vienna," said the Doctor.

"Do you know, I heard a rumour that she was a lesbian," Clara interjected.

Sarah scoffed, "I doubt that. She had a husband and children."

"Scholars are divided," said the Doctor, "But you know, France _was_ the first modern country to decriminalise homosexuality, in 1791. Do you think that should be included in my lesson plan?" She didn't wait for any answer from Clara. "Regardless, there were plenty of propaganda pieces accusing her of having illicit dalliances with the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac. They waved Lamballe's head around on a stick outside of Antoinette's window when she was locked up in the Conciergerie."

"Horrible people," said Sarah.

"She was totally gay," said Clara.

"It's fine to be wrong," said Sarah.

"You know, the historical erasure of LGBTQ people is a very real thing."

"Clara's right," said the Doctor, "It's a cultural trend."

"Well, it doesn't matter. It's not like you have a time machine and you can travel back and ask her if she fancied women."

"If only…" said Clara, smirking to herself a little.

"It's the anniversary of her death today," said the Doctor.

"Her heartless murder, you mean. Cut down in her prime," said Sarah. She seemed to be getting genuinely upset about this, or perhaps upset that the Doctor was proving she knew more about European colonial history than Sarah proclaimed to.

"Is it really?" asked Clara.

"October 16th, yeah," said the Doctor, "It was a Wednesday." Today was a Thursday.

"How do you know what day of the week it was?" Sarah questioned her.

"I've got a knack for that kind of trivia."

"If you have such a passion for France, why do you never help Matilda with her homework?" Sarah challenged. Clara was growing more and more convinced that she wasn't going to be able to get her outline done and was on the brink of giving up with it for the rest of the day.

"Oh, you mean like why don't I do your job for you?" Sarah did not have the upper hand in this exchange and clenched her jaw. "I try to help, but I can't just do it for her."

"I can't blame Mattie for not liking it," said Clara, "I always thought languages were boring as dirt."

"You are too English for your own good," the Doctor told her off for that attitude.

" _Sorry_."

"Besides, when Mattie still can't get a grip on French with my help and Stefani's help, maybe it's not the language that's the problem…" Steph had tried to help Matilda understand various foreign grammar rules many times that term, all to no avail. Jenny, too, had tried her hand, but her language assimilation meant she was at a loss to explain how tenses and conjugations worked; her brain just did those things automatically. It wasn't a subject Mattie was particularly receptive to, unlike science and maths in which she excelled. Not that she _needed_ French to be a surgeon, as was her aim.

"Are you implying that I'm a bad teacher!?" Sarah exclaimed.

"No, of course she isn't," Clara said, even though that certainly was what the Doctor had been implying.

"All I'm saying is you hand out a lot of worksheets-"

"Sweetheart," Clara cut her off and gave her a warning look, but the damage was done. Sarah was well and truly pissed off, and collected her things – which were a stack of the aforementioned worksheets and a suspiciously thin GCSE French textbook – and carried them over to one of the sofas in the staff room, dumping them on a table and crossing her arms indignantly. As if to further ruin Sarah's day, Giovanna Rizzo, another Modern Foreign Languages teacher who was, by all accounts, a much better one than Sarah was, entered the room and began to grill Sarah about using up all of her printing credit to print more worksheets off. The Doctor bit her lip.

"I feel kinda bad now," she said to Clara very quietly. Clara shook her head.

"I'm sure she'll get over it. Are you really trying to refresh your memory about French history? It's just, everything you've said makes me think it's not actually lacking at all."

"I just don't wanna misremember something and teach the kids wrong. And I have always _loved_ this period."

"…Sorry about this."

The Doctor was surprised, "What? What are you apologising for?"

"I don't know, dragging you here to this planet and making you do all this work," she lowered her voice considerably.

"You're very sweet, but I'm fine. It's education, it's fulfilling, and I get to spread revolutionary sentiments to developing youths. Not long now until they set up a guillotine in the grounds of Brighton Pavilion, _Madame Oswald_. Maybe you can finally abolish this country's tedious monarchy."

"Me personally?"

"Who else is gonna do it?"

"Well, the Americans have quite a good track record of abolishing control of the British monarchy, why don't you have a go? Or would that mean you have your knighthood from Queen Victoria revoked? Your marriage to Elizabeth I annulled?"

"I'm actually on good terms with Liz X."

"So the monarchy _isn't_ going to be abolished?"

"I couldn't possibly say. But I will point out that the French tried quite a few times to get rid of _their_ monarchy until they finally managed in 1870. But the message is clear: down with the aristocracy, abolish the class system."

"You know, I sometimes feel like in another life I was meant to be a French aristocrat," Clara mused, "Because of the debauchery. And the wine."

"If you were a French aristocrat I would never have married you."

Clara frowned, "Didn't you once have an affair with Madame de Pompadour?"

The Doctor was indignant about that being brought up, "I would not characterise it as an affair. And would you be quiet? You're going to get us caught." Clara didn't think anybody overhearing them would make the connection that they were time travellers, and the Doctor specifically was an alien who went around seducing human women left right and centre (much as she denied it.) Still, Clara took that as an opportunity to end the conversation as the Doctor returned to perusing her textbooks and Clara got back to her essay guide.

In the last half hour of the day, Sarah did not return to their table, merely occupied herself with her worksheets, while the Doctor made a list of very cryptic buzzwords about the French Revolution to help keep her on track during lessons. When the final bell rang at quarter past three, Clara was just finishing the last sentence of her revised guideline which she thought was much more concise, easier to remember, and was more adept at hitting all the criteria for the English language long-form exam.

"Here it is," she said as people began to gather up their things, "My magnum opus."

The Doctor, organising her books, papers and laptop, glanced at Clara's scribbles.

"I prefer your poetry."

"This _is_ poetry, the examiners will be loving it." The Doctor smiled fondly at her.

"You're such a nerd."

"Oh, absolutely," said Clara.

"About what you said earlier," she began a minute later as Clara wedged _Les Mis_ back into her ring-binder, "I don't think you're particularly debauched."

"Really?" asked Clara, almost like she was offended or upset at the idea. "I think I'd fit in quite well with all the libertine, French socialites. I've read _Dangerous Liaisons_."

"That explains so much about you…"

"How am I _not_ debauched? You can't just say horrible things like, 'I don't think you're particularly debauched,' and then not back yourself up with hard facts and evidence," Clara argued with her.

"You aren't morally corrupt," she said, opening the staff room door so they could enter the bustling hallways full of children trying to escape, "You don't have a bad bone in your body."

"I would disagree," said Clara after they disengaged from the crowd to head towards the back exit of the school into the staff carpark rather than towards the front gates, "I'm morally corrupt on a vast scale. I mean, I smoke, I drink to excess, I've historically slept with whomever I like regardless of gender or whether they were arseholes or not, and now I'm married to a woman – which is truly an affront to god and antiquated ideas of the family."

"Hm, well, I suppose that's a good point, you do do all of those things. But I still don't think you're debauched."

"I'll prove to you how debauched I am…" Clara grumbled as they approached the van.

"I love you, too. Are we waiting for Mattie?"

"No, she's got her bike. She hasn't texted me to say she needs a lift, so I assume she's fine to see us at home."

The mood changed once they were in the van, however. Clara didn't immediately pick up on this, and certainly not the reason for it, but the Doctor grew very agitated very quickly and ended up tapping her foot, deep in thought about something. It took Clara a while to notice because she was trying to focus on actually driving them around, something the Doctor seemed to forget took concentration. But notice she did.

"What's up?" Clara asked.

"Nothing."

"Sweetheart?"

"It's nothing." Clara didn't press her again, only waited patiently. "I just… I miss when I could tell you about a historical period, my favourite historical period, and we could just go, then and there, on a whim."

"Oh."

"I want to go."

"Where?" Clara was alarmed.

"I don't know – Paris, I guess."

"You want to move to Paris?"

"What? No! Not _move_. Just _go_. Visit."

"Oh, right. I said I fancied going to Paris the other month and you told me off, you said we'd been too many times and we should go somewhere else, so I suggested Edinburgh, and I sort of thought we were going to do that at some point?" Clara reminded her. The Doctor didn't answer, and Clara surprised her by laughing. "I'm perfectly willing to go to Paris with you whenever you like, darling. We have the wonderful privilege of not needing to take time off or save up money to go on trips, and even though we don't live on the TARDIS at the moment, I'd never begrudge you the opportunity to take advantage of it."

"You're serious?"

"If you want to go and 'refresh your memory', then by all means. Maybe it will help Matilda to get more interested in French, too. If we take her, we're not going to any dangerous periods, though. By which I do mean, unfortunately, your beloved revolution."

"Well, I guess we could just… go to the Louvre, or whatever. You're joking though, right?"

"No. You know," Clara began, but couldn't finish her sentence because she got stuck at a tricky junction and had to focus as she drove them back through suburbia. It took her a minute or two to get back on track.

"What were you saying?"

"Hm? Oh, I was going to say, it worries me that you don't always like to talk about this right away."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, don't try to bury things. I know that this is a difficult compromise for you, and you think _I_ don't miss being able to just go anywhere, anywhen, on even more of a whim than we can now? Because I do, and I understand it."

She sighed, "I know. I just don't want to drag us away somewhere and disrupt your rhythm."

"Our entire marriage has been you disrupting my rhythm, whatever that means," she joked, "We can still go to Scotland soon though, right?"

"We could take-off and go today. Do a tour of European capital cities for weeks on end."

"Mm, that's a bit too far," said Clara, which the Doctor knew.

"Of course we can. But, really, you'll go to Paris with me right now?"

"Well, not _right_ now, we're in the car. And I'll need to have a wee."

"Ever the charmer."

"Anyway, technically it's an educational trip if you're teaching it next term."

"Thank you, for the validation."

Clara turned left to steer the van into the drive. Hacking up the mutant tree that had grown there had been quite the task, especially when the roots reached deep into the underground, but they'd eventually been able to rip enough of it up that they could haphazardly fill the hole and fix the driveway. It had been quite the operation repairing Brighton's roads and infrastructure after _that_ fiasco; the tube still hadn't reopened, and there was some talk that it was used so infrequently at large that repairing it would be an even bigger drain on the city than building it had been in the first place.

The Doctor could hardly contain her excitement, bouncing on her feet while Clara unlocked the door. Inside, Jenny was baking again; she had two trays of cupcakes laid out on their kitchen table at the back of the house and was carefully piping them with pink icing so that they looked like roses.

"Can we eat these?" the Doctor asked upon entering the room. There were two-dozen of the things, and Jenny was halfway through piping them.

"The ones I've finished you can," she said. The Doctor picked two of them up, handing one to Clara when she came into the kitchen after dumping her things.

Having Jenny stay with them had been both good and bad. The bad was that it meant they had to put up with Ravenwood sneaking in during the night and had to foot the bill for the obscene amount of food Jenny consumed with her alien metabolism; the good was that she was so bored staying on Earth with no job or hobbies to occupy her that she had spent her time cooking all their meals, and she was an excellent chef. There was also the fact that the Doctor enjoyed having her daughter to stay. The cupcakes were delicious, as always.

"Had a good day, then?" Jenny asked.

"Your mother has been pissing off our colleagues," said Clara.

Jenny laughed, "How'd you do that?"

"I just suggested that maybe endless worksheets aren't the best way to get people passionate about French," said the Doctor.

"Why can't Mattie just switch to do a different subject if she hates French?"

"You need to do a language," said Clara, "It's compulsory."

"English is a language. A terrible one, I prefer German, but still."

"A foreign language," Clara reiterated, "Trust me, trying to teach them English is bad enough. I spent a whole lesson on tense agreement last year, and they still can't do it properly."

"Give her a universal translator," Jenny shrugged.

"No, she's too young," said Clara.

"She's fifty, and it's no different to getting your ears pierced," Jenny said, "They just embed in the neck."

"It's good if she learns," said the Doctor, " _I_ had to learn. It teaches you to think in a certain way."

"Anyway, don't tell her I said this, but it's not really important whether she gets a good grade in it. I did awfully in GCSE French and I'm fine – career-wise."

"Don't you need really good grades in everything to do medicine?" Jenny asked.

"She wouldn't be able to get good grades if she had a translator, you know," said the Doctor, "Because everything would just be in English. She wouldn't pass the written assessments or the speaking one."

"I suppose…" said Jenny, who hadn't thought about that.

"But we already thought of a solution to this!" the Doctor changed her tone completely, "Clara says we can go to Paris."

"Don't say it like I'm controlling you," said Clara.

"Paris? Can I come, or is it like, a gross, romantic trip?"

"Absolutely you can come! A family outing. But without Rose, we won't tell Rose. She doesn't appreciate the Louvre."

"Do I have time to finish piping these?"

"I need the loo first, so," Clara said, "And Mattie's not even-" As she said they, they heard the latch on the front door go and the sound of Matilda returning, dragging her bike noisily into the hallway. When they heard her take to the stairs, Clara intervened. "Can you come into the kitchen, Matts?" she called. They heard her descend and then come trudging in.

"What do you want?" she asked. Typical teenager.

"Talk to you," said Clara.

"Do you want a cupcake?" Jenny offered, "There's loads."

"You alright?" asked Clara when Mattie went to take a cupcake. She seemed more sullen than normal.

"I had PE this afternoon."

"That's fun though, right?" said Jenny. Mattie looked at her like she was crazy (as did Clara, for that matter.)

"It's the opposite of fun," said Mattie, "We had to play field hockey, and someone hit me in the shin and now it's bruised."

"Who hit you?"

"I don't know. I don't think it was on purpose. And Steph wasn't there because she convinced Hannah to skive the whole lesson with her."

"Surprised that Magda let that happen," said the Doctor.

"She's not teaching today, remember?" said Clara, "There was a netball tournament, or something."

"We had a supply," said Mattie, "One who didn't know what Steph's like."

"Are she and Hannah back together?" Clara asked.

"No idea. I can't keep up."

"She shouldn't be skiving lessons with Steph if she's serious about this head girl campaign," said Clara. Not that it was much of a campaign at all, or that the head boy or head girl had any pull, or that any of the student body cared about the sorry excuse for an election. It was just something that looked good on UCAS applications, and a way to encourage engagement with democracy. That was what Lorna said, at least.

"I know what'll cheer you up," said the Doctor.

"More than cupcakes?"

"We're going to go to Paris."

"Paris?" she asked sceptically.

"We'll take the TARDIS, it'll translate, don't worry."

"Oh. You mean, like, today? Now?"

"Before Clara changes her mind. We can go to the Louvre, we can go to Notre Dame, we can-"

"What about the catacombs? They have catacombs in Paris." _Now_ she was interested.

"Erm, of _course_ we can go to the catacombs," said Jenny like this was a given.

"Are you coming?"

"I have been invited, yes," said Jenny, "So you won't be stuck with these two trying to have horrible, candlelit dinners in obscure Parisian bistros." Mattie nodded, then frowned, still holding a half-eaten cupcake.

"You know I don't have a passport."

"I don't think any of us have passports, sweetheart," said Clara, "You forget that these two are both weird aliens who don't legally exist." Being born in 2014, Matilda also didn't legally exist, nor Clara – every single document and record pertaining to them was fake. The pitfalls of eternal youth.

"We've got psychic paper, it's fine," Jenny shrugged, "And if you do get detained, we'll break you out."

"Thanks," said Mattie, unconvinced.

"You won't get detained," Clara told her firmly.

"Can I like, get changed? Have something to eat?"

"What do you want to eat?" Jenny asked her.

"I'll just make some Nutella sandwiches."

"Gross…" said Clara.

"I'll do it," said Jenny, "You go get changed."

"Will you make me anything to eat?" Clara asked once Mattie had left to go change into something more comfortable than school uniform.

"Have the last of that strawberry yoghurt, it goes off today," said the Doctor.

" _You_ are a genius," said Clara, going towards the fridge. "I thought you were saving the yoghurt?" It was a pint-sized tub the Doctor had already eaten half of.

"I was, but I'll just eat all these cakes."

"If you're sure," she said, taking the pot out of the fridge.

"Don't eat it with your fingers, though," said the Doctor.

"…I wasn't going to," Clara lied. Jenny, closest to the cutlery drawer, passed her a dessert spoon to eat the remains of the yoghurt with.

"We should dine and dash at a fancy restaurant," said the Doctor.

"We can't do that with Mattie there, can't make her complicit in criminal activity. When she's older, she can decide for herself if she wants to commit crimes."

"Who cares if things are illegal or not?" said Jenny, busying herself with the Nutella.

"Obviously not you," said Clara with a mouth full of strawberry yoghurt, "Don't you be a bad influence on her."

"Me? I would never!" Jenny protested.

"Didn't you once teach her how to play poker?" the Doctor questioned. Jenny didn't say anything, returning to the Nutella without even bothering to defend herself. She made two sandwiches in the end, if they could really be called as much with only one ingredient, slathered with a generous amount of chocolate spread. Perhaps to avoid further questioning, one she was done with that she announced that she was also going to get changed before they left, disappearing upstairs. "Wow. We're alone."

"D'you wanna go for a quickie?" Clara asked with yoghurt in her mouth.

"Why? Because you're being so alluring right now?"

"I can be alluring."

"Not when you're eating yoghurt, you can't. And where?"

Clara glanced around, "Laundry room?"

"Do you think we're pretentious for having a laundry room?"

"It's just… an alcove with the washing machine in it," said Clara.

"Yeah, but – are we middle class?"

"Um… probably."

"Eurgh. We should move to a smaller house. There's a house in the cemetery for sale, you know," the Doctor told her.

"Yeah, I'm definitely not going to live in a cemetery," said Clara, "We've already got the one ghost upstairs, we don't need to attract more of them."

"Why not? We could have a dinner party."

"With ghosts? They don't eat anything."

"Exactly! Less cooking."

"You say you want a smaller house, but insist on having that transdimensional library upstairs," Clara pointed out.

"Well, that's – I'm talking about appearances."

"What do you want us to do? Live in a transdimensional shed? You've been living in a transdimensional shed for a thousand years."

"See, this is exactly why she's never warmed to you – calling her a shed," she tutted, "It's a good thing she likes Jenny."

"…Have you met this supply teacher?" Clara asked after thinking and chewing on her yoghurt.

"Which one?"

"Whoever's covering Magda."

"Nope."

"Must be a bit dense to let Steph and Hannah run off together like that," said Clara.

"Maybe they just didn't care," the Doctor shrugged, "Plus, it's physical education. I'm sure whatever they were doing in the changing room toilets for an hour was energetic, to say the least."

"Well, I… I suppose that's a good point," said Clara, "Probably more fun than getting smacked by aggressive teenage girls with wooden sticks."

"Are you speaking from experience? Were you attacked in high school PE lessons?"

"I'm very non-confrontational and apparently get on a lot of people's nerves, so yes, I may have found myself on the receiving end of more than a few hockey sticks. Frankly, not a lot has changed in my adult life. I'd much rather drag you into a toilet than do sports."

"Or into the laundry room, apparently."

"I don't know what your issue is with our laundry room. It's a good call."

"Why? We have a bedroom."

"Bedroom doesn't have a tumble dryer in it."

The Doctor paused to think about this for a few seconds before realising what Clara was implying, and then she was aghast, "You are _so_ abominable. I'm going to have to go into a different room at this rate." Clara only laughed as the Doctor huffily picked up another of Jenny's cupcakes to eat. "Go have words with Magda's supply if you're that fussed."

"I just think Hannah shouldn't skive lessons if she wants to be head girl."

"And why do you care if Hannah Beckett is head girl?"

"Because she's in our form. It'll reflect well on us."

The Doctor shook her head, "The kids don't care about who the head girl and head boy are." As she said this Mattie, freed from her school uniform and in normal clothes, came bounding down the stairs and back into the kitchen in search of her Nutella sandwiches. "Who're you voting for as head girl?"

"What d'you mean?" she asked, picking up the plate and taking a bite out of the bread. Clara had almost finished her yoghurt.

"…Who are you going to vote for?" the Doctor repeated. Mattie just shrugged. "You see, Coo? I told you, they don't care. Hannah doesn't even care, she just wants it for UCAS."

"Why's it 'head girl' and 'head boy', anyway?" Mattie asked, "Isn't that a bit outdated?"

"It's not, really," said Clara, "They just pick the two people who get the most votes."

"You can tell you're from the past," said Matilda, eating. "I guess I'll vote for Hannah because she still hates me. But what's the point of it? Do they have any power? Can they make it so we get chips every day for lunch?"

"No," said Clara.

"So they can't do anything?"

"They can't change the dinner menu."

"But what _can_ they do?"

"They…" Clara began, "Well, they… they… do little speeches on open evenings."

Mattie stared at her for a few seconds, "So it _is_ pointless?" Jenny returned now, dressed in the clothes she'd brought and dumped throughout their very small spare room. The room really was designed for guests, but somehow people kept staying over – the Doctor had even called it 'Rose's room' a few weeks ago.

"I was actually head girl at my school, you know," Clara continued to argue with Matilda about whether there was any merit to the position.

"Why's that?" asked Jenny, copying her mother and picking up another cake, "Did you give everyone head?" The Doctor almost choked on her food.

"No," Clara said, annoyed.

"Are you sure? You forget, I _am_ married to you, I've heard stories about your wild school days."

"Please, don't remind us of your marriage in that context." Jenny just shrugged.

"It was probably because she's a nerd," said the Doctor, "The head girl thing, I mean."

"Thanks. I love being personally attacked by the many wives I've apparently collected," she said bitterly. "Are we going to Paris, or are the three of you just going to make fun of me all day?"

"We can make fun of you in Paris, don't worry," said the Doctor. Clara grimaced.

"I don't get it, what were Clara's wild school days? What did you do?" Mattie asked her directly.

"I keep telling you, sweetheart, I was a lot like Steph."

"Oh. And they let you be head girl?"

"I care a lot about academia," she admitted, "I always did."

"She's a nerd," the Doctor reiterated. Clara turned a scowl on her. "Which I love about you, obviously – one of my favourite things is how much you care about books and school and grades." Clara remained unconvinced.

"Look, whatever; I've finished my yoghurt, so what's our plan?"

"Got a teleporter with me," Jenny said through a mouthful of cake. "We'll just use that. Don't want to call anybody."

"Why not? Ravenwood can fly the TARDIS," said the Doctor, prying into Jenny's personal life.

"She's in London, with Sally. Because Sally's lonely and she doesn't want to hang around with your sister," she added to Clara. "Besides, Adam and Oswin are away on Venus today. Which is lucky, because it means she can't moan at me about letting my punctured lung heal."

"…If you're not all healed yet-" the Doctor began.

" _Oh my god_ , I'm fine," Jenny argued, "It's just a lung. I've got two of them. And you said we're just gonna be walking around the Louvre."

"Yeah," said Mattie, "It's just going to Paris for a few hours. How much could really go wrong?"


	28. Vive la Révolution - Chapter 2

_Vive la Révolution_

 _2_

The TARDIS sank into the muddy silt of the Seine's northern bank, a dusky orange sun beating down on it and the wooden, portside structures it had appeared in the midst of. The Doctor stepped out and took a deep breath of Parisian air, before getting a smell of something unpleasant; probably the river nearby or some of the mud and fish that had been pulled from it. Clara, Mattie and Jenny followed in her wake but were not particularly impressed by the vision of Paris presented to them. Well, Mattie wasn't; Clara and Jenny had both been many times before and some of the mystique was always going to be lost on them. Mattie, however, appeared to have very lofty standards of what she expected from a capital city, despite the fact she – unlike her parents – wasn't from a big city at all. She'd spent most of her life shuffled from one village to another, Brighton was the biggest place she'd lived in, and she'd only spent a handful of days in London visiting relatives. And yet there they were in the centre of Paris, and she remained indifferent.

"Well?" the Doctor prompted her, "Take it all."

"Take what in? It's just some boats and wooden houses."

"What? No! Look over there," she pointed, but there was a thin layer of fog hanging in the air, "Notre Dame is right there."

"Okay?" said Mattie, squinting. Notre Dame was visible on the opposite side of the Seine, its distinctive architecture peering over the tops of the houses on the Ile de la Cité, all spires and archways. They were much too far away to see the gargoyles. "If Notre Dame is over there, why are we over here? Where's the Eiffel Tower?"

"Over there somewhere," the Doctor waved her hand in a vague direction, sort of to the right of Notre Dame, "It's not as central as they'd have you believe, it's way off at the Champ de Mars."

"There are literally two things to do in Paris and we're nowhere near either of them."

"Not true," said the Doctor, "The Louvre is on this side of the river."

"Yeah," said Clara, "We can go see the Mona Lisa."

"There are other things in the Louvre apart from the Mona Lisa, Oswald," said the Doctor. Clara just shrugged.

"I just want a sandwich," said Jenny.

"See? Why can't you two be more like Jenny? Happy with a sandwich?"

"Erm, I wouldn't say no to a sandwich either," Clara argued.

"Where is everybody?" Mattie asked, "Shouldn't there be people here?" In the few minutes they had been there, the Doctor hadn't quite noticed that the bank was deserted. Mattie was right, there probably _should_ be people there. She could definitely _hear_ people when she focused, quite a lot of people and quite nearby. She spotted a narrow staircase behind them against the large wall of the river bank and headed towards it, stepping carefully over the mud and the reeds so that she didn't ruin her shoes. It was probably just tourists; Paris was full of tourists throughout the entire year, and it wasn't beyond comprehension that there would be some event on in the city to attract even more.

"Careful on these stairs, there aren't any railings or anything," the Doctor warned. The steps were slippery and a little rotten from when the Seine bulged in the rain, and just ascending them was somewhat treacherous. Nowhere near as treacherous as the scene that awaited her when she reached the top, however.

Suffice it to say, Paris had not been mysteriously abandoned of all life, and there certainly _was_ an event on. But it wasn't an event tourists would have any business attending, no matter how exciting the people found it. The Doctor stopped dead and stared when she climbed over the top of the riverbank onto a cobblestone street. Even with the fog, it was an unmistakable scene. They had emerged onto the square directly in front of the Hôtel de Ville, the otherwise ornate building playing witness to a ghastly state of affairs. A baying mob brandishing pikes, effigies, and homemade _tricolore_ flags was gathered and fervent at the base of Madame la Guillotine, raised on a platform above the rabid crowd with a coating of fresh blood shimmering on its slanted blade. The Doctor had clearly made a grave error with her coordinates.

"What's that? Is it like, a re-enactment?" Mattie asked, eyes on the guillotine at the centre of the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville. Turning back towards the south, the Doctor strained to try and make out the familiar shape of the Eiffel Tower, but even without the fog, she was sure it wasn't there at all. Too many people were dressed too authentically as French peasants to be anything except the genuine article, there was no trace that she could see of the fire damage on Notre Dame's central spire, and the lamps littered around the square were still lit by flickering candle flames. They hadn't even moved on to gas yet.

"I think we should go," said the Doctor, "You know, we can, uh… they've got those things on display in museums back home, so…" For all her fondness of French history and even French revolutionary history, she still had nothing but contempt for public executions – or any executions. Perhaps she agreed with the motivations in this case and knew the many crimes of the French aristocracy, but she did not want to _witness_ the guillotine at work.

"Wait, this is the French Revolution?" Mattie asked eagerly, "The _actual_ , real French Revolution?"

"Yes, but this was a mistake," the Doctor reiterated, "Probably the telepathic circuits getting involved where they shouldn't be, taking us to what smells like the 1790s. So, the three of us should just – no!" Unfortunately, Matilda loved blood and guts more than she disliked France and was overcome with excitement at the sight of the contraption. She took off towards the crowd, the Doctor not able to grab her and stop her in her tracks.

"Mattie!" Clara shouted after her, but she didn't listen, "Shit! Bloody teenagers, come on." She, Jenny and the Doctor gave pursuit very quickly towards the guillotine. Already the mob was overrun with people brandishing severed heads on sticks and angry flags, though; Mattie disappeared into the throng. Clara didn't like this one bit and immediately resorted to intangibility to slip through the people. Jenny and the Doctor weren't that lucky and were inevitably slowed. In the distance, bells began to chime; Notre Dame was signalling the time. The bells rang five times in all and finished just as Clara got to the front of the group and seized hold of Matilda's arm. "Do _not_ run off like that," she hissed, "It's dangerous here."

"Shh, I'm trying to watch this."

"It's not a spectacle," Clara told her, though the cheering crowds around them, elbowing them to get a better view, begged to differ. There were soldiers lined up at the base of the guillotine platform brandishing rifles at the crowd to keep them from storming it.

"What's he being executed for?" Mattie asked. A young man was marched onto the platform and forced to kneel by two more guards, the executioner waiting at the guillotine's handle. He had his head placed in the stock and the wood was closed around him, locked with a bolt by the executioner.

"No idea," said Clara, "Don't watch this, let's go."

"Why?"

"Because public executions are cruel," she said as quietly as she could while still being heard; no doubt the crowd wouldn't take too kindly to her sympathising with whomever they were killing. But there was a reason public executions weren't the done thing in the future, and why France had stopped using the guillotines decades ago.

What alarmed Clara most of all was the sheer speed and lack of warning that was given. She supposed after so many executions people weren't there to be talked at or forced to wait. There was no announcement of his name, no request for last words, not even an explanation of his crime. The executioner pulled the handle to release the blade, ten feet above the man's neck, and it came sharply down to raucous, deafening cheers. Clara didn't even have a chance to try in vain to cover Mattie's eyes. Blood sprayed across the spectators as they shrieked and jeered.

" _Voila_!" yelled another official who had been standing on the other side of the guillotine to the executioner; he lifted the still-bleeding head of the man out of the bucket and brandished it by its hair above the crowd, "The head of the traitor!" The Doctor and Jenny pushed their way to the front but were quite a few feet away from Mattie and Clara and unable to come much closer because of the guns. "This Royalist _crétin_ was discovered smuggling letters from Marie Antoinette to Austrian conspirators! His fellows are being hunted by the _Comité de salut public_ as we speak, but never fear, Antoinette dies tonight in the Place de la Révolution! _Mort à la reine! Vive la France!_ " The crowd screamed their support.

A trio of men, more soldiers, ascended the platform and took the head from the official shouting whatever violent, patriotic phrases he could think of. The body was thrown in a wooden cart at the side of the guillotine with about half a dozen others, covered in blood left out in the sun. Carrying the head, smirking and muttering to each other, one of the soldiers bumped right into Jenny as he went past. Clara was much too far away to hear what had happened, and the Doctor looked deep in thought, but Jenny certainly seemed disturbed. She turned to see where the soldiers were heading and then got her mother's attention. They exchanged words and then motioned for Clara and Mattie to follow them.

"Come on," said Clara, pulling Mattie back through the crowd by her elbow, phasing them both as she went. Matilda's brief excitement for seeing a real, working guillotine had died as soon as reality had hit. It was one thing to talk about that sort of stuff, it was another to see it and be part of the crowds out for blood. The crowd had already begun to disperse as soon as the execution and calls to support whatever regime was in charge had gotten repetitive. It didn't take them long to find their way out, slightly disoriented, at the foot of the looming and grandiose Hôtel de Ville. The Doctor and Jenny found them shortly thereafter. "Well?" Clara prompted, "Are we leaving now?"

"I don't know, this is all wrong," said the Doctor, "This is October 16th, 1793, it's the date of Marie Antoinette's execution."

"Yes, so? He did say they were going to kill her later tonight."

"That's my point," she reiterated, "Marie Antoinette was supposed to die at noon today, _five hours ago_. And I've never heard anything about her smuggling letters out to her Austrian relatives to conspire, or any kind of Royalist plot like this. Plus – tell them what you heard the soldier say," she prompted Jenny.

"He walked right into me while he was saying something to the others about wanting to know what secrets the head will tell them. Those were his exact words."

"Maybe it was a metaphor," said Clara, not liking where this was going.

"Coo, I promise I set the date correctly, I triple-checked. If we're here, this means the TARDIS has taken us here on purpose. It's too much to be a coincidence. And talking heads?"

"Maybe they're really into New York post-punk." The Doctor made a face. "What do you want us to do? We don't even know where they're taking the head."

"What are you talking about? Of course we do, they're right over there, going towards Pont Notre-Dame." They were dressed in bright blue, so they weren't particularly difficult to see, and there was the fact they were waving a human head around. "Madame Tussaud's workshop is on the Ile de la Cité, just over that bridge. She's working for the National Convention making death masks."

"So, let me understand this – you want to go and talk to _the actual Madame Tussaud_ about severed heads, based on something offhand a random soldier said?" Clara questioned.

"Well, I've never met her," said the Doctor.

"You alright, Matts?" Jenny asked Matilda quite seriously.

"I'm fine," she said somewhat unconvincingly. They would have to keep an eye on her. "What was that guy talking about? Why was he executed?" They set off walking, keeping a safe distance between themselves and the trio of soldiers.

"Marie Antoinette is Viennese, she's part of the Hapsburg Empire; if he was smuggling letters for her to Austria it could be part of a plot to remove her from France and take her home. She and Louis XVI tried to escape the Tuileries to go to Varennes but didn't manage it. Anyway, we're totally in the middle of the Reign of Terror right now, which means you can get sentenced to death for basically anything. And that's not even a retrospective name, they literally named it that themselves."

"And people are fine with that?" Mattie asked.

"Oh, no. One of the times I was here happened to coincide with the Thermidorian Reaction, next July, where they finally got sick of the Reign of Terror, broke into the Hôtel de Ville back there and sent Robespierre and his buddies to the guillotine instead. But you know, that's interesting, because Ian ran off to try and actually stop Robespierre from being overthrown," the Doctor continued, "Which he didn't manage to do because that's all a fixed point in time. I had to bust Susan and Barbara out of the Conciergerie."

"Why were they imprisoned?"

"Hardly any reason at all," she said, "But listen, for all intents and purposes, just act like we support the Revolution at this point in time, but be kinda vague about it. It's not just Revolutionaries versus Royalists – I wish it was that simple. I mean, nice as it would be to visit Notre Dame," again she indicated the vast cathedral towering over the rooftops ahead, "It's being occupied at the moment by this extreme atheist group called the Cult of Reason who are trying to dismantle Catholicism's hold on France. They were so extreme the Reign of Terror dudes disavowed them."

"Wait, you've met Robespierre?" Clara asked.

"Yeah. He liked me. At the time I was an old white man, so maybe that had something to do with it. Looking back, it does worry me that he wanted to be bros…" she mused, "Like, I'm all in favour of revolution, but not executing forty-thousand people in the space of one year, that's kind of whack."

"Just 'kind of'?" Clara jibed.

" _Anyway_. Madame Tussaud. We better be careful… Let me know if anything starts to bother you, by the way," she added hastily to Jenny.

"What do you mean?" Jenny asked, focused on the soldiers.

"Susan got sick when I was last here, couldn't do anything about it because we were separated at the time… the first place we went on Earth was the Revolution, you know," the Doctor reminisced, "She always loved it, too."

"What _did_ happen to her…?" Jenny asked slowly. Jenny had never met Susan but didn't know if she had perished in the Time War with the rest of the Gallifreyans.

"Oh. She… well, she actually fell in love with a human and left the TARDIS to go live on Earth," the Doctor cast no small glance at Clara when she said that, then smiled to herself, "If she could see me now I haven't a clue what she'd say. She'd probably laugh. I'm sure we'll cross paths again someday."

"Who's that? Susan, I mean." Mattie interrupted.

"My granddaughter, first person I travelled on the TARDIS with," the Doctor explained, "She was around your age, but she was always _terrible_ at passing for human. Though, to be honest, I think that runs in the family."

"I'm a very convincing human," Jenny argued, correctly spotting that this was a dig at her, "I'm two-hundred-and-fifty years old, I think I know how to pretend to be a human by now, mother."

"And yet here you are, yelling about your age while we're halfway across the Pont Notre-Dame following a bunch of Jacobin soldiers and a severed head."

"We're gonna lose them, come on," Mattie said, speeding off again. Clara was keeping a closer eye on Matilda than the men with the head as they pushed through the crowds going in the opposite of direction, many of them heading into northern Paris, perhaps for the executions. "I want to meet Madame Tussaud and see how she makes death masks. Do you know, CPR dummies' faces are modelled on the death mask of a girl who drowned in the river here?"

"I had no idea," Clara lied. She had known that but didn't want to curb Mattie's enthusiasm for everything morbid. They had yet to decide if it was a good or bad thing if the girl was pursuing a career in medicine, but Clara supposed Dr Cohen was _quite_ a big fan of everything to do with death and was a very celebrated pathologist. She seemed to have recovered from seeing a man have his head cut off just minutes ago, at any rate. "CPR dummies are disgusting, anyway."

"That's a bit mean to the girl who drowned," said Mattie, Jenny and the Doctor now taking the lead while they bickered about which one of them was a better fake human – Clara thought they were both terrible.

"You should see the state of the one they keep at school. The spit alone is… eurgh."

"Mouth-to-mouth hasn't been an official part of CPR for decades," Mattie said.

"I think that dummy's been in the cupboard gathering dust for decades."

"I wonder what you'd find if you swabbed it."

"Honestly, sweetheart, I dread to think."

"Hold up a second – try to look inconspicuous," said the Doctor, going to lean on a wall as the soldiers up ahead stopped in front of a house and started to bang aggressively on the door.

"Darling, we're the least inconspicuous people here," said Clara, "We're not in period clothes at all."

"She has a point, maybe we should go back to the TARDIS and find something to wear?" said Jenny.

"Shh, shh," said the Doctor, squinting at the soldiers as the door was opened they started arguing with whoever was in the doorway. Was it Madame Tussaud? Clara didn't know what she looked like, and it was too dark inside to tell. They shouted for a few minutes until the soldiers were let inside. "Come on."

"What? We can't go in there, there are soldiers," Clara hissed as she walked towards the building.

"I've got a cover story."

"You've-!? _No_ , this is a terrible – urgh!" But Clara was forced to follow because if her wife was going to get herself arrested by Robespierre's foot soldiers, she'd rather be there too.

The Doctor, Jenny in tow, walked right up and knocked at the door after the soldiers had disappeared inside. They could still hear talking inside, which turned into shouting.

"I don't only offer my services to _le Tribunal révolutionnaire_. I have customers," they heard a woman say from within. The door opened and a woman greeted them, the soldiers with their head lurking behind. " _Oui_?"

" _Bonjour, nous excusons pour la gêne occasionnée_ , we're a group of envoys from an art gallery in London – we've heard about the work you're doing here in Paris and are interested," the Doctor introduced them and flashed her psychic paper, which the woman – who Clara realised must be Madame Tussaud if the Doctor was greeting her like that – read over, and then smiled.

" _Bien sûr! Bienvenue; bienvenue à Paris_ ," she held open the door to just let them in.

"Nobody is allowed in here," one of the soldiers ordered.

"This is my workshop, these foreigners have nothing to do with your revolution, and if they actually appreciate my work unlike Robespierre they're perfectly welcome," Madame Tussaud said. Clara was struck by how young she was – barely thirty, and already well on her way to building her lasting legacy of creepy wax figures.

"Monseigneur Robespierre saved you from the guillotine," one of the soldiers warned her, "You don't want to get on his bad side."

"He has no other side to get on," she snapped, then prompted them, "Well? Are you going to take it to the cellar so I can hurry up and get on with my work?" The soldiers, grimacing, did just this, going behind the wooden staircase's slats and descending to another level below them. They were still carrying the head. What were they doing down there with it? Wasn't it to go straight to Tussaud so she could make her death masks? "Which gallery are you from?"

"Hm?" the Doctor asked, forgetting her story for a second, "Oh, a new one. Your models are very… contemporary. The interest is new. We can't guarantee any fame, but we'd love to get to grips with your process." Of course, it didn't matter what the Doctor said about her fame, because the truth was she was going to become very a famous indeed – a household name, in fact, because of her uncanny valley creations.

"You have an unusual accent to be from London."

"Oh, I'm not – fresh from the colonies," she said, "You come to Europe to get away from violent revolutions and whaddaya know – France just _has_ to descend into chaos. Typical."

"I think your revolution has gone better than this one," said Tussaud.

"Well, I mean, depends who you ask. Like, I guess being ruled by the British isn't something anybody wants, but who've they put in charge now? Some guy with over a hundred slaves to his name and really bad teeth."

"They were wooden, weren't they?" Mattie asked, "George Washington's teeth."

"Actually, no," said the Doctor, "They're mostly carved from the teeth of other humans and some animals. Which, to be honest, is kind of worse… and here they say the English don't do dental hygiene. Then again, I am married to an English person completely incapable of using a toothbrush correctly." Clara glared at her.

"I hate those things," said Tussaud.

"English people or toothbrushes?"

She laughed, "Both. Unless they want to let me exhibit my models."

"You hate toothbrushes?" Mattie asked.

"They're horrible, made of pig hair."

"They're _what_?"

"1793," Jenny hissed at her. Clara didn't know what was worse, not brushing teeth at all or brushing them with pig hair bristles and sugar-paste.

"Anyway," said the Doctor, "We're here to talk about your work, not about teeth; why don't you tell us what those soldiers are doing with the head downstairs? Is that a part of your process?"

"Playing ridiculous games, I should think. I'm not privy to the details, and if I ask too many questions I could be sent to the guillotine again. I don't care enough about what they're doing to risk that. Robespierre wouldn't spare me twice, the wretch."

"Yeah, Max can be a jerk like that," the Doctor mused. _Max_ , Clara thought? "Where do you do the work, then? I can't help but notice there aren't a lot of severed heads in here."

"They're upstairs, they're too easy to steal at street level, and I always have people at the windows looking at them," she said. Clara glanced at the ceiling and saw a few dark stains on the floorboards – she would like to think those stains weren't human blood, but they undoubtedly were. It was Madame Tussaud's workshop, after all.

"Do people steal them?" Mattie asked, enthralled.

"Some have been stolen before, luckily only after I made the masks, so I can't say it matters."

"Are they worth a lot?" asked Clara.

"No, but they like to stick them on pikes and take them to the guillotines."

"Of course they do…"

Without warning, people started yelling downstairs. They were bombarded with a whole slew of aggressive, French swear words that were borderline incoherent, and even Tussaud seemed surprised at their volume. She also cursed, but under her breath, displeased at her workplace being taken over by the revolution's goons.

" _Mon Dieu_ , these men are horrid," she grumbled.

"What are they shouting about?" Clara asked, a question directed mostly at her wife but open to anybody who wanted to answer.

"They're not," said the Doctor, "They're just shouting." The shouting got worse, imbued with a few screams, and then there was one last shout that was almost a frenzied roar and a piercing, male scream, then all sound stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Tussaud moved out of the way of the door as thumping footsteps came marching back up towards them. The cellar door was kicked open and the highest-ranked soldier brandished the severed head towards Tussaud, only now it had a long candle rammed into its eye socket. Tussaud shrieked upon seeing it.

"How am I supposed to get a good likeness of the traitor when you do this!?" she demanded.

"You can just mould a new eye," the soldier snapped at her, "Isn't that what makes you so special? It can't be that hard to dump a head into a barrel of wax." She glowered at him, absolutely seething, and he dumped the head, its face now contorted in horror, on a table covered in papers.

"You're going to get blood on my ledger!" Tussaud continued to argue, going and moving the head immediately; there were a few blots of blood on the pages, though. She swore once again. "You people are brutes. You tell Monseigneur Robespierre what you've done, that this is your fault. Or are you scared that it will be your head in my lap if you do?"

"Nobody wants to put their head in _your_ lap, Madame," one of the other soldiers jeered, and his two friends laughed cruelly. Tussaud grew even more enraged, then made a frustrated sound and pushed straight through the soldiers, taking her head and carrying it away upstairs. The soldiers then took their leave, ignoring the four observers who had watched this entire scene play out, making more glib remarks about Madame Tussaud as they left. They didn't even shut the door.

"…What just happened?" Mattie asked eventually.

"I suppose they didn't like whatever that head had to say," said the Doctor, thinking. "Okay, Jenny and I will go take a look in the basement, you two go upstairs and keep her distracted talking about her process, or whatever. Keep up the art gallery act for the moment." Clara nodded and Mattie bounded away to follow Madame Tussaud, apparently thrilled to learn all about how she made her grisly death masks.

"Maybe she will get passionate about French from this," Clara quipped before she left, too.

If they had been wondering why the ground floor wasn't dirty, the first floor answered all of those questions. Clara now understood why Madame Tussaud's had once been nicknamed a house of horror because that was certainly what they found. Immediately she locked eyes with the milky, vacant stare of one of a dozen or so severed heads lined up on a shelf.

"Cool!" said Mattie, spotting the heads, "It looks like pre-production for a horror movie."

"Yeah…" said Clara, unconvinced. Tussaud dumped her newest head on a table covered in bloody rags and went over to a fireplace that was smouldering away with two pots on top. All over the place were buckets and barrels filled with this or that, bloodstains everywhere. Mattie was thrilled. "I do worry about you, Matts…"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Just… you've seen a lot of dead people at quite a young age," said Clara.

"Young age?" Mattie questioned, a subtle way to challenge Clara's perception of her. It was impossible to tell where the teenage Matilda ended and the fifty-year-old one began. "You know, there's a kid in Year 10 who does taxidermy." Clara knew which boy she was talking about.

"That's because it's his family business, he's been surrounded by it his whole life."

"Yeah, and my mum's a doctor."

"She didn't bring dead bodies home, though," Clara pointed out.

"Dr Cohen does."

"When have you ever seen where Cohen lives?"

"Well, I haven't, but I hear what people say."

"Eavesdrop, more like…" she muttered. Tussaud took one of the pots off the stove and Clara saw it was only full of water, which she poured carefully into a bowl of white powder – she was making plaster.

"Did I hear correctly? Your mother is a doctor?" Tussaud questioned as she mixed her plaster. _Now_ who was eavesdropping?

"Well, yeah," said Matilda, not correcting her tense.

"I've never heard anything of the sort, even in London. How remarkable. Not just a woman, but a woman of your-"

"Why don't you tell us about your process?" Clara interrupted because god forbid they hear Madame Tussaud say something casually racist. They had been remarkably lucky so far where that was concerned, considering they were in the 18th century.

"You can help if you like. I doubt you can do any more damage than those soldiers. And the girl is more than old enough – how old is she?"

"Fifteen," said Clara.

"I was her age when I started sculpting because Monsieur Curtius was kind enough to tutor me when he took care of my mother and me. He'd be ashamed if I didn't return the favour," Tussaud said. It was absolutely going to come back to bite them if they let Matilda be taught how to make accurate death masks by Madame Tussaud. Clara didn't know when, but she knew it would happen one day.

"Help how?" Clara asked carefully.

"You can pull the candle out," she nodded at the head, "I can melt it and use it in the mould."

"Really!?" Mattie exclaimed.

"No," said Clara, "I'll do it. You stay over there."

"That's not fair!" she protested.

"I mean it," said Clara firmly, doing her teacher voice. Mattie was irritated and crossed her arms in a sulk, but at least she gave up, while Clara was forced to deal with the head. Oh well, it wasn't the worst thing she'd done, or the worst foreign object she'd pulled out of a human body. She had to give that award to herself a dozen times over, distinctly remembering both the time she'd fallen out of an escape pod and found herself impaled on a branch in an alien jungle, and the time she'd ripped a crossbow bolt out of her own face. At least the candle wasn't stuck in _her_ eye socket.

It was wedged in there, though, right through and buried in freshly deceased brain matter, and she did struggle to free it without using telekinesis. Eventually, she did manage to dislodge it after wrestling with the severed head for a few seconds, and she pulled it out slowly and found it covered in dark pink gunk and blood.

"Just wipe it down with one of the rags, then drop it in the pot of wax over the fire," Tussaud instructed her. Clara did just this, lifting the lid on the second, larger pot and finding it full of pale, melted wax. She dropped the candle in, and it slid underneath the surface. She wondered if the wick would damage the mould at all. Lucky she had a pack of tissues and some antibacterial hand gel in her pocket. It wasn't as good as getting to actually wash her hands with soap, but it would have to do. "I didn't catch your names."

"I'm Clara, this is Matilda."

"And the others?"

"The Doctor and Jenny."

"Another female doctor?"

"Well, she's American," said Clara. Not necessarily an explanation, but she said it like it was meant to be, and Tussaud didn't quite care enough to question her.

"I suppose if Britain's colonies can revolt, they can do all sorts of other, unheard-of things, too. Tell me, Matilda – what kind of spectacles are you wearing? I've never seen any like it." They were relatively standard, white, rectangular frames.

"Do you not have glasses in the past?"

"Excuse me?"

"I mean – in France."

"No," Clara interrupted, then to Tussaud, "I told you, we're from London, we're from an art gallery. They're experimental, they sit behind your ears instead of having to hold them or wear a monocle."

"How remarkable. And what are they in aid of?"

"Um, just eye stuff," said Mattie. Tussaud glanced up from her plaster and waited for Mattie to elaborate. "I have a squint, and I'm short-sighted."

"She had surgery when she was a baby," said Clara.

"Eye surgery? And you didn't lose sight?" she returned her attention to the plaster.

"She got very lucky."

"Who are you to her?" Tussaud inquired, perplexed by Clara's habit of answering on Mattie's behalf.

"My wife and I are her legal guardians." There was a pause and Tussaud scrutinised her. Clara realised what she'd said. "I mean – my platonic, um, companion, who I'm friends with, in a completely platonic and friendly way." Another pause, and for good measure she very awkwardly repeated, "We're friends."

Tussaud laughed, " _C'est Paris, mademoiselle_. Is that sort of thing recognised by the church in London?"

"Um… no. Maybe one day. It's more symbolic." Mattie shook her head at Clara, evidently making fun of her for now making rookie mistakes when she was supposed to be the experienced time traveller.

Entirely different events were unfolding downstairs, however. Jenny and the Doctor had slipped away into the basement as soon as Clara and Matilda had vanished up the stairs. They didn't have a light source, irritatingly, but the soldiers had left a few candles down there lit. It was incredibly dim and smelled unpleasant, but they just about managed to navigate their way down the creaky, wooden stairs.

Madame Tussaud's cellar was just as ghastly as her first floor, full of botched wax statues. Mangled arms, distorted faces, broken legs; it was littered with these bits and pieces. It was also where she kept most of her wax, a few barrels full of it ready to be scraped out and taken to melt elsewhere. They could see where the candle had been stolen from, a circle of melted wax lying on a wooden table on the far side of the room, but it wasn't initially clear what they had been up to.

"What's that?" Jenny asked, pointing out an object on the table. It was dirty and scuffed, but some sort of gauntlet. It looked like a glove from a piece of medieval armour, belonging to the right hand.

"Maybe she was sculpting a chevalier," the Doctor quipped, going to look at the gauntlet. It had blood on it and so did the table, some of it fresh and shiny – it must belong to the head of the alleged traitor. "Do you know what this room makes me think of?"

"Madame Tussaud's museums?" Jenny suggested.

"No – I mean, yeah – but no, it makes me think of Autons."

"Autons are plastic though, aren't they?"

"Yeah, thank god. Although, their heads _can_ sometimes talk when disconnected from the body. I once pulled off Mickey's head when he was an Auton clone."

"Best not mention that around Mattie."

"I don't know, maybe she'd think it was cool. Maybe he already told her about it – it was the day he met me, after all. Do you know he got eaten by a bin?"

"Well, anyway," Jenny ignored most of that, "If they were Autons, they wouldn't bleed underneath the guillotine."

"That's true. And the Nestene Consciousness wouldn't be here, they don't even have plastic yet. Speaking of reminiscing, though, do you know I learnt to cook here?"

"In this cellar?"

"In Paris, in the 18th century. That's where _you_ get it from, after all."

"Not true, I learnt to cook in Venice in the 25th century. I was Jenny Aloisi."

"We both know you're naturally gifted at cooking-"

"I'm naturally gifted at everything."

"-because _I_ put in the hard work."

"Then why am I a better chef than you, if that's true? You just can't stand that I'm better than you are. Parents always hate when their children exceed them."

"I'm actually very proud of you."

Jenny didn't know what to say, and ended up clearing her throat awkwardly and nodding at the table, "What's the glove, then?"

"I don't know, but I don't like it. Something about it is unnerving." Jenny reached out to touch it, but the Doctor held out her own hand to stop her, then took out her sonic screwdriver. She felt like she'd seen something like this glove somewhere before and decided to scan it. She was surprised when the sonic stuttered while it worked. "Weird…"

"What is it?"

"It's…" she was about to say it was something bad when she realised that she did know what it was, more or less, and she was right in her assessment. But she didn't get the chance to explain this to Jenny when the front door above them was kicked in and they heard the loud, angry voices of the Jacobin soldiers. Jenny grabbed her elbow and dragged her into the shadows behind the slatted stairs and among the wax horrors. They barely had time to get out of sight when the soldiers, not even waiting for Tussaud to give permission, forced their way into the cellar arguing with each other.

"We don't have _time_ for a party, Jacques," one argued with the leader, "We need to get the _Gant droit_ back to Robespierre."

"I'm not wasting time I could be spending at the Palais de l'Égalité reporting back. He can wait for a few hours," the leader, Jacques, persisted. With him, he'd now brought a chest just the right size to fit the glove on the table, and he picked it up and dropped it in with little care. The Doctor and Jenny watched from the gaps between the steps.

"He won't like this. Not with the rumours about the Queen-"

"She's no queen of ours," Jacques snapped.

" _Oui, bien sûr_ , but if someone really is going to break her out like the traitor's letters suggested – and Robespierre will already be furious that we didn't get any information from the head – then everyone is needed at the Conciergerie."

"I don't care. I'm not missing another party. Her execution is scheduled in less than an hour, they can't break her out in that time…" They began walking up the stairs again, Jenny and the Doctor ducking back down into the shadows and listening as they discussed the details of this party and how desperate Jacques was to attend, in spite of his duty to the revolution and assuring the Queen was executed at seven o'clock that evening.

Upstairs more shouting began as Tussaud returned to scream at her intruders, but they dismissed her after a few crass comments and left.

"Well?" Jenny prompted as they crept back out, "What was it?"

"It's something Jack calls a Resurrection Gauntlet," the Doctor explained quietly, "He once asked me if I knew anything about them, but I didn't – I only know what it is because I recognise it from his story. Unless I'm wrong, I could be." The door was forced open _again_ , slamming into the wall, and Clara practically fell down the stairs in her rush to check on them.

"Are you okay!? The soldiers came back!"

"I'm fine," said the Doctor, "We just hid, they weren't paying much attention. And if they saw us, we could've just said we were looking at these freaky, botched waxworks."

"What did they want?" Clara asked. Mattie and Tussaud remained upstairs, the former bothering the latter with all sorts of questions about how she made the death masks.

"The Right Glove, that's what they called it," said Jenny.

"It's a device that can bring people back from the dead, but only for about thirty seconds to a minute," said the Doctor, "I don't know who built them or why, or if that's the same one Torchwood Three had or a different one. I guess they were using it to interrogate the dead guy and he mustn't have said anything useful because they stuck him in the eye with a candle."

"I don't think that's the sort of technology Robespierre should have at his disposal," said Clara.

"No, me either… I've got an idea…" she left them both to ascend back to the ground floor, the pair of them following in her wake, so she could ask Tussaud some more questions. "Hey – do you know anything about a party at the Palais-Royal tonight?"

"When _isn't_ there a party at the Palais-Royal? Tonight is the execution of the Queen, I'm sure they have lots to celebrate. Then again, I have heard rumours about Royalists attending those parties. I suppose they can't hold parties of their own without _le Comité de salut public_ sending them to their deaths."

"What time is the Queen being executed?"

"Seven o'clock or so. It depends if there are any more delays so that Robespierre can interrogate her more. I doubt she's planning anything; I remember the _Fuite à Varennes_ , Madame Élisabeth told me about it."

"Who's that?" Mattie asked.

"The king's sister," the Doctor added. "Okay. Clara and I will go to the Palais-Royal to look for the Glove and see about these Royalist rumours. Mattie and Jenny will go to the Place de la Révolution and see if anybody _does_ try to break out the Queen or if she ends up executed. See if anything fishy happens."

"Alright," Jenny nodded.

"Aren't you here to see my work?" Tussaud asked.

"Well – you're making the death mask of the Queen, aren't you?" the Doctor asked.

"Presumably."

"So, we're very interested in that. If she doesn't get executed you can't make the mask." This certainly wasn't airtight reasoning. "Look, this is kind of a mini-break for us, and what better things to do in Paris than go see the Queen eat the guillotine and hang out at an aristocratic party? We'll be back to watch you make the Queen's death mask and talk about touring England. But, um, do you have any clothes we might borrow?" Tussaud frowned. "We're just… dressed for London."

"The way you talk about London, it sounds like another planet."

She laughed awkwardly, "Yeah. Funny, that…"


	29. Vive la Révolution - Chapter 3

_Vive la Révolution_

 _3_

"These clothes are _stupid_ ," complained Mattie, trailing after Jenny and fumbling with a ridiculous, 18th century dress she'd been kindly loaned by Madame Tussaud. Jenny, too, had found herself in period clothes, but didn't mind as much – she was used to disguises. She was also counting her blessings that she wasn't wearing anything anywhere _near_ as gaudy as what her mother and Clara had ended up in; she and Mattie needed to blend in at a public execution, _they_ needed to blend in at an aristocratic party in a palace. Crossing the Pont Notre-Dame for the second time that day, Clara and the Doctor lagged behind in their ridiculous period dresses.

"You have to look the part, Matts," said Jenny. It was dusk, but night would fall within the next half hour. She paused with Mattie to wait for the other two to catch up, but the Doctor was slowed down significantly by monumental spite for the existence of corsets. Jenny muttered, mostly to herself, " _I_ don't mind the corset, _I_ could have gone to the party…"

"Do you want to go to the party?" Mattie asked her.

"Not really. They're basically just orgies, aren't they? Ravenwood won't be happy if she hears I went to a French orgy without calling first. In fact, I'm not sure she'd be entirely happy about it even if I _did_. Besides, I don't blend into 'high society' very well. Would you two hurry up?"

"I can barely _breathe_ ," her mother protested.

"Stop whining," said Clara, "This is what you deserve."

"For what!?"

"For forcing all the women you've ever travelled with into corsets when _they_ have to wear period clothing, too," Clara said. She was clearly enjoying this. "You know what they say, when in Rome…" They finally caught up and the group began moving again, albeit at a snail's pace. Mattie hoped they didn't miss the execution.

"I don't know why I can't just wear a suit. You know, when I was a guy, I could just wear a suit whenever and that was that," she bemoaned.

"Well, there are these things called sexism, misogyny, the patriarchy…" Clara began.

"Clara's right," said Jenny, "And you can't wear a suit if your aim is to blend in, women don't wear suits in this century. The only way you're going to get information out of any secret Royalists is to convince them you have similar interests – otherwise, they'll assume you're trying to trick them. Which, you are."

"Don't broadcast it," said the Doctor, glancing around as they passed around the edge of the crowd still gathered at the Hôtel de Ville.

"Where are we going?" Mattie asked.

"West, just follow the Seine until we get to the Tuileries, then we'll split off," she said. It wasn't long before they got stuck in a slow-moving crowd all heading in the same direction they were – to watch the Queen get her head cut off. "You two be careful at this thing. People get trampled and crushed in the crowds at executions. Pretty morbid stuff. And you're both short."

"We're _all_ short," Jenny pointed out.

"I'm still growing," Mattie argued.

"I doubt that, sweetheart," said Clara, "You take after your mother."

"If worse comes to worst, we'll just keep out of the way and Mattie can stand on my shoulders," Jenny said.

" _Stand on them_!?" Mattie exclaimed.

"Yeah," she shrugged, "It'll be fine. I'm strong."

"I'm more worried about falling."

"Oh. Well, sit on them, then. You'd definitely be able to see over the crowds."

"You just need to make sure she actually gets the chop," the Doctor pointed out, "You don't need front row seats. Ah-ha!" she exclaimed, stopping dead amid a crowd to stare at a large building next to them.

"What?" Clara asked, confused.

"It's the Louvre!"

Clara squinted at it, " _Oh_. I didn't recognise it without the pyramid. Has it not always had the pyramid?"

"No! They won't put that thing there for another two-hundred years, I.M. Pei designed it. He designed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, too, which is also a bunch of big, weird-looking pyramids. Y'know, it only opened two months ago, in August this year."

"The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?" Clara asked.

"Are you being like this on purpose?" Clara just shrugged. "No, of course not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Louvre. But they don't even have the _Mona Lisa_ yet."

"Was it not always a museum?" Mattie asked as they began to walk again, apparently not deigning to visit and look at whatever small collection the building boasted after only being open for two months.

"No, it's a palace. In fact, it was originally a castle, they built the first bits of it in the 13th century," the Doctor explained, "But the revolutionaries decided that art should be for everyone and not just the rich people who hoard it, so they opened it to the public. Y'know, like Banksy."

"I heard a rumour," Jenny began, addressing the Doctor while they walked, "That _you're_ Banksy."

"Jenny, you've met Banksy."

"What!? When? I'd remember."

"He was at our last wedding," said Clara, "He had the silver tooth."

"He… _that_ was Banksy? That bloke?" Jenny was taken aback. They both nodded and Jenny sank into silence, crossing her arms and straining her memory to try and remember this encounter as best she could.

"What happens if someone _does_ try to break out the Queen, though?" Mattie inquired when the noise of the baying crowds surrounding them started to get unbearable with no conversation to drown it out.

"The mob would take over, I expect. Just stay out of the way and keep an eye on things, _don't_ intervene," the Doctor advised, "If, somehow, she does escape, try and get a look at where they head off to. But the whole place'll be swarming with Jacobin soldiers as well as the crowd."

"And what about afterwards?" Jenny continued; she had more of a mind for planning than her mum did. The Doctor could barely even plan what she was having for dinner.

"We'll meet back at Tussaud's. She's waiting there to receive the head. Maybe _we'll_ get to talk to it before the soldiers have a chance," the Doctor lowered her voice.

"Right, but about what? What do they want to interrogate her head for? About her escape attempt that will obviously have failed if she's rendered a severed head?" Jenny asked incredulously.

"I don't know that part. I don't think an escape plan is what the main issue is. Like I said, with so many people all desperate for her to die, and she's only a stone's throw away at the Conciergerie – the most important prisoner in France – she doesn't have a _chance_ , no matter how many Austrian princes may or may not be plotting to help her. No, I'm willing to bet there's something deeper going on, something to do with that Glove… why bring someone back to life just to ask if there _might_ be a plan to break someone you already have in your custody out?" She had a point; it was quite an elaborate course of action. "Here's the palace."

"The Palais-Royal?" Clara asked.

"No, this is the Tuileries, I said," the Doctor indicated a vast and ornate building to their left; they were just at its corner. Stretched out ahead of it, between the road they were on and the Seine, was an enormous garden with rows upon rows of neatly-groomed hedges and other foliage. "Okay, we're going that way," she pointed in the complete opposite direction, to a road to their right which was comparably emptier than the one running alongside the grounds of the Tuileries, "You two just follow the crowds all the way down here, stick to the gardens, and then you'll get to the Place de la Révolution. Can't miss the guillotine. Keep your distance, but try to get eyes on it, alright?"

"Yes, alright, we heard," Jenny brushed her off, "Don't intervene with any potential escapes, just watch from afar."

"Don't get Mattie into trouble, either," the Doctor warned, "You'll look after her, won't you?

"Of course I will," said Jenny, as Mattie got a bit huffy by her side and mumbled something about being able to look after herself, "I'm trustworthy. I've babysat her loads of times."

"I'm not a baby," Mattie complained.

"If anything happens, ring me straight away," Clara implored Matilda directly, turning serious now, "Doesn't matter if anyone sees the phone, they don't have cameras. As long as you don't lose it, a few stray glimpses should be fine."

"Alright," said Mattie.

"Do you promise?"

" _Yes_ ," Mattie was increasingly annoyed with Clara trying to be a responsible adult.

"Also," Clara added as the Doctor tried to get her to leave, "This _is_ the 1700s, so just… I mean, if anyone says anything, y'know, prejudiced, uh…"

"Don't worry," said Jenny, "I've got my pliers. I'm perfectly happy to pull out the teeth of some French racists."

"That's a last resort," the Doctor told her off.

"Obviously. You go for the fingernails first."

"You are…" she shook her head, then turned back to Clara, "C'mon, let's just go. I'm sure Jenny will handle anything that comes up." Clara was obviously not thrilled about leaving Matilda with only Jenny but was dragged away into the crowd before she could raise a final objection.

"Are you joking?" Mattie asked Jenny as Jenny began to walk again, staying at the edge of the palace garden like the Doctor advised.

"Sort of. I don't have my pliers. You can pull out teeth with your hands, though. It's all in the technique, you have to wiggle," Jenny explained, "I'm sure you'll learn about it when you become a surgeon."

"Well, you'd have to be a dentist for that, or dental surgeon, which isn't the same thing," said Mattie.

"No, you'll be pulling out much more interesting things than teeth – like organs. And you can sell those. Can't really sell teeth. Not that I, um, support organised crime. Don't do crime, Matilda," Jenny advised, "Don't sell organs on the black market."

"You could sell teeth to George Washington."

"That's some great historical retention. My mother would be proud." They walked down the long street, neatly-trimmed hedges bordering the grounds of Tuileries on the left and tall, square-cut trees down the middle of the road on the right. It certainly did look like a royal residence, but its effect was neutered by the crowds of angry sans-culottes brandishing _tricolore_ flags, pikes and torches. The orange of the flames mingled with the dusky glow of the sky as night drew closer. "How's it been, then? Living with them?"

"Um… okay, I guess," said Mattie, "…It's fine. They're nice." But they weren't her parents.

"Are you doing okay? Coping alright with everything that keeps happening?"

"You sound like Clara."

"Clara just cares about you – and she's a good person to have care about you. The girl has more empathy than she knows what to do with." Mattie was reminded of Clara, just a few weeks ago, stepping in to defend a complete stranger against a violent and corrupt police officer. The small wound on her head had yet to heal fully.

"You're biased, though," said Mattie.

"Well, y'know, I… have my reasons for loving her," said Jenny, "That's a story you're too young to hear, though."

"But I'm not too young to hear about you pulling people's teeth, or to watch the Queen of France get her head cut off?"

"Do you really want to hear about Clara and me?"

"…No," Mattie admitted, "I just wish you wouldn't all say I'm 'too young' all the time. I'm fifty."

"D'you know what I was doing when I was your age?"

"What?"

"Working hard in school. I was at university – the University of Atelerix. Got my engineering and astrophysics degrees," Jenny said, "And one in history, but we never did the French Revolution, unfortunately. And I didn't even have a relationship with anybody until I was in my eighties. You _are_ young, and that's a good thing. You should know that before it's too late, and it's over, and then you do have responsibilities."

"You're making me sound ungrateful."

"I don't mean to," Jenny apologised, "I just mean you're lucky to stay a kid for so long. I've never had that chance. There'll come a day where you won't be too young and people will stop trying to protect you from dark things, and then you'll have to face them head-on. Maybe even pull out a few teeth of your own." Jenny stopped walking and Mattie followed suit, not paying attention to their surroundings while she mulled over what Jenny had said. It took her a few moments to realise that they'd arrived at the bottom of the grounds of the Tuileries; ahead of them was a large square, larger than the one outside of the Hôtel de Ville, with another gruesome guillotine at its heart. The crowds were thick and swarmed at its base, shouting profanities and jeering. The Queen hadn't even been brought out yet.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking for a vantage point," Jenny explained, "We ought to stay out of the crowds, get a good view from somewhere else… it's always bigger here than I expect. Then again, when I go to Paris I usually spend all my time in the Marais." She said this like it was a joke, but Mattie didn't understand what it meant. "What do you think about these statues?" She pointed one out on the corner of the square, a woman sitting in a throne with a sword resting on one shoulder on a large, white plinth. It also had quite a lot of children climbing on it, all also angling to get a good view of the execution.

"Covered in kids," said Mattie.

"What? You're scared of some Parisian children?"

"…No, I'm not scared of some children-" Mattie argued. Jenny interrupted her with a laugh.

"Don't worry. Wait right here, I'll get us something to help out with the frightening children."

"What? Where are you going?" Mattie asked, but Jenny ignored her. Lucky for Mattie, she wasn't left alone in revolutionary Paris for too long, and Jenny remained within her line of sight as she walked straight into a man. This man was initially irritated until Jenny gave him a very sympathetic and upset look and began to profusely apologise. Mattie being at the distance she was, however, was able to glimpse Jenny's hand snaking around and snatching a bag from his belt. _He_ was completely unaware and overcome by her presence, but she bade him farewell as quickly as possible after stealing his money. He was left in the middle of the crowd, surprised by the encounter. Jenny practically vanished among the people, alarming Matilda who really, _really_ didn't want to be left alone just then. It was only when Jenny's mark, confused but oblivious, began walking again towards the square that she reappeared from within a group of strangers and made Mattie jump.

"Come on, then," Jenny said, beckon for Mattie to follow her as she approached the statue.

"Why did you steal that money?" Mattie hissed.

"Bribe those children," said Jenny, "Get us some snacks, maybe. Do you think they sell snacks? Like… hot dogs?"

"Like at a baseball game, you mean?"

"Yeah!"

"Probably not. Aren't all the poor people starving at the moment? Isn't that why they're revolting?"

"That sounds correct…" Jenny nodded, walking around to the front of the statue so she could address the children who had climbed up onto it. Street urchins. " _Salut!_ Is there any room up there for the two of us?" There were maybe ten of them who all glanced at each other, muttering, until one – who looked to be the oldest, maybe twelve – spoke.

"What are you going to do for us?"

"Make it worth our while," jeered a second even younger one. Then they made some rude gestures.

"Filthy children, great…" muttered Jenny, then she lifted the purse and began to search through it, "I can do you, uh… I don't know, what's this?" she held up a gold coin, and the boys stared.

"It's a Louis d'or," said the main boy, " _Êtes-vous Français?_ "

"Sometimes," said Jenny, "Look, I'll be honest, I stole this money just now, and if you let us onto the statue you can have the whole purse. There are a lot of gold coins in here." She took out two more to prove this. The boys again conferred with one another.

"…The whole purse?" the lead boy questioned.

"Yep. Just to get good seats to watch the execution," said Jenny, "I'm thinking of getting into executions myself, see, so I need to be able to see. Then again, what would my career trajectory be? After the Queen of France gets the chop? There's no way I could ever beat that reputation…" she mused, then smiled at the kids and held up the purse. "Do you want the money or not?"

Like a swarm, they descended. As soon as they were off the statue Jenny tossed the purse in their general direction and they all began to fight over it like seagulls and a bit of sausage roll. Then again, they could probably get quite a lot of sausage rolls with the contents of the purse. Did they have sausage rolls in 18th century France?

With the statue freshly cleared of children, it didn't cause Jenny any difficulty to do quite an impressive wall-run to gain the height needed to grab onto the base and haul herself up. The benefits of being an alien super-soldier and a master thief, Mattie supposed, but she didn't think much of her own chances of doing that. The bottom of the actual statue, on top of its monolith, was over ten feet high – twice her height.

"Uh…" she faltered.

"Just jump, I'll grab you," Jenny said, crouching down and holding out her arm. Her arms weren't very long though, and the whole situation looked precarious. Mattie remained unconvinced.

"There must be, like, an easier way… how'd those kids get up here?"

"Probably by helping each other," said Jenny, "It's fine. You weigh basically nothing, and I used to do this sort of thing for a living."

"What sort of thing is that?"

"I'm an acrobat," she answered. Feeling like she was making more of a scene if she continued to stand there and argue while the crowd around them wanted their execution viewing to go undisturbed, Mattie gave up and was reduced to doing as Jenny bade, scrambling up the side of the monolith and jumping for Jenny's hand. True to her word, Jenny was able to lift her onto the base with ease. The hard part over, they climbed onto the slightly higher statue, Jenny on its knee and Mattie a little lower on the seat of the throne.

"You were an acrobat?"

"Yeah! I ran away and joined the circus."

"Ran away from what?"

"Earth," she said, "I was very young. Twenty."

"Did something happen?" Mattie pried, "Was it like, a girl?"

" _Wow_ , you're all questions. Nosing about in my life."

"Your life sounds interesting."

"It's not all it's cracked up to be. I worked in a lot of Air Force bases during the war – World War II – travelling around, helping with this or that. Sometimes medicine and nursing, sometimes engineering, I even learnt how to fly a plane. I have a complicated relationship with warfare, me being an indoctrinated, cloned soldier, and I didn't think much of it. Plus, they _were_ fighting the Nazis. And then the Americans dropped the atom bombs, and I got a bit disillusioned with humanity. Swore off them."

"But you must've come back to Earth," said Mattie.

"For all we know, I could be on Earth right now," she said sarcastically, "There's no way to tell." Mattie ignored this.

"You grew up on Earth, didn't you?"

"Sort of. I came back because over the course of my travels I found out that most species wage war, a lot of them much more tenaciously than humans, so my disavowing them was a bit… I don't know, dramatic? Naïve?"

"Where'd you go when you came back?"

"Ended up in East Berlin. And that time it _was_ about a girl. But that's a story for another day. I've actually still got my gun from those days, a very old Mauser C96. It still had a Balkenkreuz on it, which I tried to scrape off. Someone stole it from a dead Luftwaffe officer."

"What's that?"

"Nazi Air Force," Jenny explained, "I'd show you it, but I think mum would kill me. And let me tell you, you don't want to go to a city partially under Soviet control with a Nazi gun, that won't do you any favours."

"I'll bear that in mind if I ever find myself in the Soviet Union…"

"In a way, I prefer East Berlin to revolutionary Paris. Hang on, look," Jenny pointed. The crowds were getting riled up about something, heads turning towards a large thoroughfare between a set of identical palaces. Mattie wished the Doctor was still with them to tell them what the streets and the buildings actually were since Jenny wasn't a Parisian history buff, but they were very large and very grand. She thought at least half the buildings in Paris must be palaces.

"I'm not sure we can see much more from over here," said Mattie.

"We'll be fine, I've got tools." She fished around underneath the dress she'd borrowed from Madame Tussaud and drew out a pair of round-lensed glasses. Mattie had been half-expecting her to pull out a knife, or her Nazi pistol.

"Do you need glasses?"

"No, but they've got a zoom feature. And night vision and thermal imaging. Oswin made them, a very long time ago now," Jenny said, sliding them on and squinting into the distance. Mattie bitterly wondered why Oswin had never made _her_ fancy, futuristic glasses. "Do you think there's anywhere to get some macarons around here?"

"How should I know? What can you see?"

"Nothing yet. I'm gonna bake some macarons later. I don't think my meringue technique is up to scratch. Y'know, macarons were first baked in Venice, not in France at all. And that's where I learned to cook."

"Look!" Mattie hit her arm and then pointed. A cart was rolling slowly towards the Place de la Révolution, pulled by a singular horse and surrounded by an armed entourage of Jacobin soldiers. Jenny, with her modified eyewear, could see a lonely woman dressed in rags with her hands bound behind her sitting upright in the cart. A priest was by her side and stared dead-ahead. The crowd was too riled up for their words to be coherent, but the tone made it clear that they were hurling insults at her left, right and centre. This was Marie Antoinette, the Last Queen of France, on her way to the guillotine.

"You could get your phone out and try to zoom in?" Jenny suggested.

"No thanks… I think I'm alright not seeing it close-up."

"I don't blame you. She's running out of time for her escape attempt, though."

"Did they do executions in East Berlin?"

"Not public ones," she said, "Lots of Nazi war criminals, including one killed by guillotine, nonetheless. The _Fallschwertmaschine_."

"What does that mean?"

"Falling sword machine. It's a good language, very literal. Wonder if they'd've executed me… maybe. In fact, almost definitely, they could've got me on impersonating a Stasi officer."

"Why would they get you on that?"

"Because I used to impersonate a Stasi officer," she said, "That's the East German secret police. We used to smuggle underneath the Wall." The distant soldiers had to threaten the crowd with swords to keep them away from the cart, stop them from knocking it over and tearing her to pieces before she could even reach the guillotine.

"So… what's your opinion on capital punishment, then?"

"Eurgh, I hate it," said Jenny, "Mixing murder and bureaucracy, recipe for disaster. Nobody has that right, and certainly not whatever brutes have taken over France. Not that the monarchy was much better, I suppose."

"It doesn't look like a great way to die, going through all this…"

"At least it's quick. Hanging's worse, they flail," she said, "Chestburster is _quite_ a bad way to die, I think…"

"Is that story true?" Mattie asked. The story about Jenny getting impregnated by a facehugger and then killed when the xenomorph burst out (she'd seen _Alien_ many times.)

"Unfortunately, it is. But, funny titbit, Clara's – _my_ Clara's – TARDIS got overrun by xenomorphs because of that, they made a nest, so they had to stay with us for a while. If it wasn't for that, we _never_ would have been together. Not in a million years. So you know, silver linings. And your parents were both there that day. Your mother was all ready to go toe-to-toe with the thing, did they ever tell you that?"

"Not in so many words," said Mattie, smiling a little thinking about her mum trying to fight a xenomorph.

"I think it's showtime," Jenny nodded ahead. Far away, Marie Antoinette was being removed from the cart by armed soldiers at the foot of the guillotine. Slowly, Jenny saw her ascend the steps onto the platform to widespread cheering from the crowd. It was as loud as a football match, only celebrating someone's death rather than sports.

"Will this take a long time, do you think?"

"I doubt it. They've already got the formalities out of the way with the trial," said Jenny. Somebody on the wooden platform started to loudly address the crowd, but not loudly enough that either of them could hear him, and Jenny didn't have any gadgets to help her hear better over long distances. As she was led towards the guillotine, Antoinette accidentally stood on the foot of her executioner and Jenny saw her mumble something. Then she was forced to kneel and place her head in the wooden restraint as it was closed on top of her.

It certainly was swift. She didn't kneel for very long as the inaudible speech was given, and without so much as a chance to hear her last words, the lever was pulled and the deadly blade, still stained with blood, came slashing down. Mattie didn't look at this one, but Jenny paid close attention as the head flopped forwards into a bucket. The cheering from the crowd was deafening, as the head was lifted and brandished to the public. It was still dripping blood from its stump.

"She didn't escape, then?" asked Matilda.

"Apparently not…" Two soldiers on the platform lifted her body and threw it unceremoniously into a large cart on the ground, atop a pile of a dozen or so other headless corpses. The head was tossed down to the very same soldiers who had been marching with the carriage, now left with nothing to guard. "No pike for her, she's going straight to Tussaud, I suppose… can you see anything suspicious?"

"Apart from them?"

"Who?"

"Over there," Mattie pointed. A group of three or so men observed from far away, right at the edge of the pavilion and closer to Mattie and Jenny than to the guillotine. They were wearing black and observing with flat expressions. "What do you think? Her rescue party?"

"Three men against this crowd?" Jenny asked. By this point, night had very nearly fallen around them. The men slowly began to move, taking the long way to avoid the crowd rather than trying to cut through – which happened to bring them even closer to Jenny and Matilda, as they headed towards the Rue Royale. From the statue, Jenny could see the soldiers now with Antoinette's head forcing their way through the baying crowd, all trying to get their hands on the head of the queen to mutilate or damage it in some way. They looked to be on course to intersect, the Royalists and the Revolutionaries, and Jenny held her breath as they got closer and closer.

Ultimately though, this did not come to pass. The men in black kept their eyes to the ground, ignoring the soldiers as they passed by, and the soldiers turned the opposite direction to head back down towards Tuileries. She felt for sure they were going to try and swipe the head. Perhaps she had misread them? Maybe they were just frightened aristocrats worried about who was next in line to get the chop.

But then she realised they were doing something else entirely. While the head went one way, the body of Marie Antoinette was being pulled away on a cart, and that proved much less interesting to the mob. So uninteresting, in fact, that Jenny herself had forgotten to take note of it. There it lay atop the nobodies, she could see with her high-tech glasses, and the men in black fixed on it as soon as the soldiers with the head had passed them by.

"I've got a hunch," Jenny announced.

"What hunch? We should probably wait for the Doctor and Clara to finish with what they're doing."

"No, no. We need to follow them follow that body."

"The body?"

"Mm. See, we know where that Glove is; it's at the Palais-Royal. That's why mum's gone there. So they can't get that head to tell them anything until the soldier stops trying to get his leg over and takes the Glove where it's supposed to be. We know that head is going straight to Madame Tussaud, and nobody's gone to intercept it."

"Not _yet_ , maybe they're waiting further away from this mob?" Mattie suggested.

"What could they want it for, though? The head? Ask it about its failed escape attempt? I think mum's right about there being something else going on, and I think we should see what that lot want with a headless body. They have to have some reason to go after it."

"Is going off-book such a good idea?"

"Matts, we're time travellers. There is no book." Jenny promptly descended the statue, climbing down from its knee and dropping lightly onto the ground. Mattie was much more intimidated by the long drop below. "Just jump, we're gonna lose them in the crowd at this rate."

"It's kind of high…"

"Just remember to bend your legs when you fall," said Jenny, "Absorb the impact."

"What if I break my legs?"

"You're not gonna break your legs."

"You don't know that."

"You'll be fine. Just lower yourself off the base and drop the rest of the way. It's, like, barely five feet if you do that."

"That's your whole height!"

"And I'm right here to help you! But hurry, I don't want to have to ask around for the location of mass graves," Jenny said. Feeling Jenny's frustration and seeing the shadowy Royalists threaten to disappear, Mattie threw caution to the wind and did as instructed. Suffice it to say, she'd never been particularly agile and felt a jolt of pain in both her legs when she came falling back to the ground. Thankfully, Jenny _did_ step forward to help her and keep her from falling completely as she wobbled, but she didn't have too much time to get her bearings. "See? All fine. C'mon, they're going towards the Champs-Élysées."

"I thought you don't know Paris?"

"There's a difference between knowing your way around Paris and knowing the complete history of every single building we go past, like my mother," said Jenny, "I know where we are."

They managed to catch up to the Royalists just before the crowd at the guillotine began to disperse, meaning they were far enough ahead that they wouldn't lose sight of the people they were tailing.

"What do we do if they see us?" Mattie asked Jenny quietly.

"We'll be fine, stay in the shadows of the buildings," Jenny advised. They strayed further north from the Champs-Élysées, turning right as they approached the gardens down a much narrower street flanked on either side by the typically tall, Parisian terraces. Jenny made sure they kept their distance, lingering behind a carriage that had been overturned and left to rot. It had a bird's nest inside, so it must have been there in the street for a while. At the top of the road, where the Royalists were heading, she saw the remains of a bonfire.

"What are they burning out here?"

"Dunno. Rich people's possessions, maybe?" Jenny suggested. They ducked behind the carriage when one of the Royalists glanced back, presumably to check for any pesky sans-culottes brimming from the euphoria of watching the Queen die who fancied their chances with a few grieving aristocrats. Seeing nothing, they carried on walking – Jenny saw it reflected dully in the window of a house in front of them. Taking advantage of the window she decided not to move until she could no longer see their reflections. By now, night was well and truly upon them, the moon high in the sky.

When they were out of sight she crept, Mattie on her heels, out from behind the ruined carriage and crossed the street as quickly as she could. They came upon a larger thoroughfare, the Royalists already crossing over again, aiming for another street leading off to the north. Keeping a distance, Jenny crossed the road as well to stay on the same side as them as the cart with the bodies, much further ahead, rounded the corner onto the Rue d'Anjou.

"What if we go too far and Clara and the Doctor can't find us again?" Mattie whispered.

"It won't come to that," said Jenny, "They're taking the bodies to a cemetery, it won't be too far."

"Cemeteries aren't usually right in the middle of cities, though."

"They are in 18th century Paris," said Jenny, "It was when they started overflowing that they exhumed all the bodies and built the catacombs south of the Seine. Clara and I once came to Paris with Sally and Esther, on the Eurostar, and the two of them being vampires _loved_ spending as much time as possible skulking around down there with the… skulls. Very morbid."

" _Overflowing_?"

"Yeah. Brace yourself for a bad smell."

The Rue d'Anjou was a very long, straight street, and they were able to keep an eye on both the royalists and the bodies. They hadn't been spotted so far, luckily.

"I don't get it, what could they want the body for?" Mattie asked, "If they've got the head they can get it to talk on its own, can't they?"

"I suppose we'll find out. Are you feeling passionate about France yet? You can tell your friends at school about the evening you spent following the decapitated corpse of Marie Antoinette to a mass grave in the 8th arrondissement."

"Why? So I can get sectioned?" Mattie challenged.

"Doesn't it make you want to conjugate some verbs?"

"Honestly, I sort of want to go home at this point. I'm really starting to understand why my parents wanted to keep me away from the TARDIS."

"We can't keep you in bubble wrap forever."

"But you could try to _not_ take me to the French Revolution…"

"I'm sure it's safer here than in Brighton the other week, with those trees. You remind me of Martha when you go worrying about stuff like this. And Mickey, to be honest. The things she used to say to me whenever I ended up with a new injury… when she found out I got in that car accident with a Porsche stolen from the mafia." Jenny glanced over her shoulder every so often as she talked to Mattie, keeping most of her attention on the royalists.

"You stole a car from the mafia!?"

" _No_ , someone I know did, a friend of mine. Happened to be the leader of the Irish mob. I was fine, I only got a little bit shot. God, but I remember when she heard about that _other_ car crash I was in with a flying car I took to get away from the yakuza. Got in a swordfight that day, too."

"Oh my god. You're a lunatic. I need to find Clara."

"It's _fine_. That won't happen here. There aren't any cars."

"Because the cars are the problem…"

"You're _so_ desensitised to this," Jenny joked a little, "Anybody else would be losing it, but you're like, 'hmm, maybe you should've taken me somewhere a bit less dangerous in your one-of-a-kind time-and-space machine.' The dangerous places have the most excitement. There, see?" She nodded ahead, "A church. Must be the destination."

Under cover of darkness, the cart with the bodies was dragged into the walled area behind a partially constructed church. The Royalists paused after the cart had vanished behind the wall, meaning Mattie and Jenny had to pause too, lurking in a small snicket between two terraces so they could remain out of sight.

"What do you think they're doing?"

"Waiting for the bodies to be dumped, I think," said Jenny. While they couldn't see what was happening, it didn't take long to throw a few corpses into the graves because the cart reappeared after only a few minutes, now emptied. The same men who had pulled it through the streets began to take it on a return journey, back to the guillotine to wait for the fruits of tomorrow's slew of executions. The cart came trundling past them and they had to hide from the Royalists waiting for it to vanish. When they peeked their heads around the corner again, the Royalists themselves were just about disappearing into the cemetery gates. Mattie wasn't happy about Jenny crossing the street yet again so that she could get a good view straight into the cemetery, thanks to the glasses, but followed nonetheless as they lurked at a safe distance.

There the dark shapes of the Royalists, and there was no doubt that that was who they were now, moved about within mounds of bodies. She saw a sign betraying it as the _Cimetière de la Madeleine_.

"It's basically the same as the catacombs you wanted to visit if you think about it," said Jenny.

"How do you work that out?"

"Well, it's the same bodies. Before they moved them. Just disorganised."

"What if they're just… moving it somewhere more private? She _is_ the Queen, after all. It's not nice for _anybody_ to be buried in a mass grave."

"I hope that's the case, but the existence of that Glove makes me think otherwise. Then again, if mum and Clara manage to get it away from here, it won't matter where the body _or_ the head is. They can do what they like with them."

They hadn't even bothered to bury the bodies fully, just dumping them in there instead, so it didn't take long for the Royalists to find what they were looking for. Momentarily, Jenny and Mattie witnessed them carrying the corpse between them, now too preoccupied with that to notice the girls.

"Now this is interesting," said Jenny, "Anyone who was at that execution – which has to be about half of Paris – is going to recognise what that is."

"So?"

"So they can't be taking it too far until they get it out of the streets," Jenny deduced.

And she was right. It was a very short journey from Madeleine Cemetery to some sort of underground entrance, a stone staircase near the road they were on leading below street level. It had a wrought iron gate blocking it off at the bottom of the steps, but the Royalists had a key to open it. As they took the body of Marie Antoinette into the tunnel they were still oblivious to their stalkers.

"I thought you said there aren't any catacombs?" Mattie questioned.

"Not here. But there are sewers."

"If you tell me you want to go into the-"

"No. If something happens down there, they wouldn't find us in time," said Jenny ominously. Mattie wasn't remotely comforted by this statement. "But now we know where they've gone, and there are only so many ways in and out of those sewers. I'll bet my mother knows every last one of them.

"In the meantime, I kept some of the change from that purse, so we can find something to eat. Have you ever had snails?"

Matilda grimaced.


	30. Vive la Révolution - Chapter 4

_Vive la Révolution_

 _4_

"I am _not_ convinced that leaving Matilda with your daughter is a good idea," said Clara as the Doctor dragged her by the hand down a narrow street leading north from the Louvre, straight towards the grandiose Palais-Royal. Clara, who wasn't particularly versed in architecture, was unable to tell the nuances of the Palais-Royal apart from those of the Tuileries, the Louvre, or any other ridiculous renaissance building they found themselves in awe of. It had the typical grand façades and was lined by covered arcades and neoclassical columns.

"Jenny's watched Mattie her whole life, they'll be okay," the Doctor assured her, "She's good at looking after other people, just not herself. And how much trouble can they get into just watching an execution?"

"Is that a serious question? Jenny could be in a coma and still manage to get into trouble."

"I'm gonna ignore that and again express that I have faith in her abilities to keep an eye on a teenager. Word of advice, it's called the Palais de l'Égalité at the moment. Because, y'know, the Duke of Orléans doesn't want to get the chop. Changed his own name to Philippe Égalité."

"Did that work?" asked Clara.

"No, they're gonna kill him in two weeks. But keep that schtum. Not that he's here, he got arrested in April. Still, any mention of 'liberty' will help keep the people here on our side," she said, "It's certainly a favourite haunt of a _lot_ of lower-class people. And plenty of upper-class people, too. Home to Paris's _first_ fancy restaurant, Le Grand Véfour. And you can still go there in our time period."

"Wait, I'm confused, what actually _is_ the Palais-Royal?"

"A palace," she said.

"With a restaurant?"

"Well, no, they've been building attractions here for years. It has shops, restaurants, arcades, theatres, bordellos, casinos; all that good stuff. Like a… mall. Sort of. A mall full of prostitutes and drunkards. For all his flaws, it was the current Duke of Orléans who opened it to the public. His execution was more to do with his son knowing someone undesirable. C'mon, I'll show you something good." She took Clara's hand and led her through the porticos, the palace gardens stretching out in the open air next to them. It wasn't very busy at all, presumably because everybody was in attendance at the nearby execution. "Voila!" The Doctor presented her with a small café nestled cosily in a corner with seating spilling out into the walkway.

"You're gonna have to explain what I'm looking at," said Clara.

"This is the Café de Foy! All _kinds_ of undesirables hang out here, including one Camille Desmoulins, currently under threat of being ousted from the National Convention. He stood on this very table," the Doctor indicated a random table nearby, "And he waved a sword around and called the people to arms, and do you know what happened two days later?" Clara shrugged. "They stormed the Bastille! I remember it like it was yesterday."

"What? _You_ stormed the Bastille?"

"No, too much violence. But I was here for Desmoulins' speech. And I've heard around that more than a few aristocrats come to the Café de Foy to hide now, including the _Ordre Royal et Militaire de Saint-Louis_. If we're searching for rumours of a Royalist plot to rescue the Queen, it's those boys we need to be looking for," she said.

"Mm, I thought we're meant to be looking for the soldier who has the Glove?"

"We'll go ask around with some ladies of the night once it gets dark and things start picking up in the upstairs rooms," she explained, going towards the door of the Café de Foy with Clara close behind her, "In the meantime, we can get something to eat and do a little eavesdropping. Unless you want to split up? One of us looks for the Glove, one of us listens for rumours?"

"No, no. It's fine, I suppose. But how are you planning on getting us something to eat when you don't have any mon-"

"Henri!" the Doctor called loudly to a waiter who was on his way back into the kitchen, having just served a bottle of wine to a pair of men seated by the window. The waiter was surprised and squinted at her for a second as she beamed, and then recognised her with a start.

"Doctor! It's been a long time since you showed your face around here," he joked, coming to greet her.

"Hasn't it just?" she smiled. Clara cleared her throat.

"Sorry – have you been here since you… you know?" she meant 'regenerated.' _She_ had not been to revolutionary Paris with her wife before and was very suspicious of this man recognising her. The Doctor grew very uncomfortable and began to stammer.

"I, uh, well, you see-"

"I hadn't seen you since Monsieur Desmoulins handed out those cockades," said Henri. Clara crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows at the Doctor.

"Um… can we talk about this in a minute, Coo?" she asked quietly. Clara remained sceptical but didn't want to embarrass the Doctor when this was all clearly a ploy to get them a free meal.

"Jousserand won't be happy to see you here," Henri warned.

"We won't stick around, just a quick catch up."

"Not interested in seeing the execution?"

"When you've seen one you've seen them all," she said indifferently, "This is Clara, by the way."

"This is the girl you were-?"

"I was just wondering-" the Doctor cut straight across him, but Clara was alarmed.

"Have you been talking about me to a bunch of random French people?" she asked. The Doctor gave her a look before turning back to the waiter.

"I'm so sorry about her, Henri – the thing is, she's English."

" _Oh_. That explains it," he nodded.

"D'you think you might be able to slip us something to eat, maybe?" she asked, "I wouldn't ask, but I've fallen on hard times and don't have any money at all. Even this dress is borrowed from somebody. Promise we won't have any of your wine."

"…I'll see what Gérard says."

"Gérard can't say no to me," the Doctor smiled, "Honestly, leftovers would be great. Whatever he can throw together." Henri thought about this and eventually nodded, indicating for them to take a seat before finally vanishing into the kitchen at the back of the café again. Trying to make up for her mistakes, the Doctor pulled out Clara's chair for her, but it didn't do an awful lot to get her to drop the subject of the Doctor's secret visits to the 1700s.

"Well, then?" Clara prompted, leaning forward on the table towards her.

"What?"

"Don't 'what' me. When, exactly, were you here last?"

"In 1789." Clara glared at her to get her to spill the beans. "Alright. Fine. It was four years ago."

"Four years ago in-"

"I don't mean four years ago in 1789, that's a coincidence. I mean four actual years ago, to us."

"…Oh." Things had been very bad between them four years ago. Before the Dimension Crash had stolen this Doctor and sent her forty-nine years into the past, Clara had been agonising with her desire to leave the TARDIS and felt incapable of discussing it with her other half.

"I just… I wanted to go somewhere, and I knew you wouldn't come with me, and I did ask you that morning if you wanted to go out. You shrugged me off and went back to bed, so I came on my own. Maybe I vented a little to some of the clientele and Henri back there before getting caught up in what Desmoulins was shouting about. And that was two years before they repealed the sodomy laws, so there's me whining about a woman not loving me anymore-"

"I never stopped loving you," Clara interrupted softly, "Not even for a second."

"I know that _now_. I had no idea what was going on with you, with us, at the time. I thought you wanted to dump me and were too scared to say it. So, yes, I came here recently, and I didn't bring you or tell you about it. But you understand why, don't you? And I brought you now; I love having you here now."

"But what would you have done if you did get arrested for sodomy?"

"Well, if I got arrested I would've been sent to the Bastille and then broken out two days later by the revolution," she shrugged, "I would've improvised something. Waited around until the Thermidorian Reaction and borrowed my own TARDIS for a few minutes to use the phone."

"…Do you sneak off at night now?" Clara asked carefully.

"Not on the TARDIS. I go for walks sometimes if it's a nice night," she admitted. "But it's not to do with you. We're good." She paused. "Or are we not good? Are you saying we're not-"

"No, no-"

"No we're not good?"

"We're very good, alright? Very, really good. I was just wondering. Because I worry about you getting into a scrape."

"You think I need you there to rescue me? Protect me?"

"Historically, you do, because you're an idiot."

"Gee, thanks. I'll remember that the next time you ask me about French history." Clara rolled her eyes.

Henri chose this moment to return from the kitchen, coming straight for their table.

"Gérard is making you each a croque-monsieur," he said, "No wine."

"Just what the doctor ordered!" the Doctor grinned, "D'you get it? Because _I'm_ the Doctor."

"Not sure who needed that explaining, but I suppose if you're happy," Clara commented.

"Tell Gérard I'm sure it'll be a masterpiece, and we're very grateful, especially my lady friend. She _loves_ a croque-monsieur."

"Do I?" Clara asked as Henri left.

"Yes, I've made them for you before." Clara frowned, thinking. "It's like a ham and cheese toastie, but fancier and with Dijon mustard. You'll see, don't worry. I usually make you it with an egg on top, but I don't think Gérard will be too happy if I go demanding an egg. There's a food shortage at the moment, after all."

"I do have another history question," Clara said after she gave up trying to remember the last time she'd had a croque-monsieur made for her, "Unless you're still too upset with me to field it."

"No, go ahead."

"It's about Victor Hugo."

"Hasn't been born yet, but sure. I'll see what I can do."

"I heard a story about all the brothels in Paris closing on the day of his funeral because all the prostitutes were in mourning," Clara explained, barely able to remember where she'd heard that (but she had.) "Is it true?"

The Doctor laughed, "It's half true. They probably just took their business outside. Two million people attended his state funeral, that's a lot of potential clients for a budding, young prostitute. I don't doubt that he slept with every prostitute in Paris, though; he's a nightmare to hang around with. Always looking for a new woman."

"What? You know him?"

"Yeah, we're good buddies, Vic and I."

"But – you've never taken me to meet him!" Clara protested.

"Take you to meet a guy who slept with two-hundred women in two years? Besides, I really don't want to be around him now I've regenerated. It was one thing hanging out when we were both boys, and this was a few hundred years ago, but me now?"

"Are you worried he'll seduce you?"

"He'd try, and I don't want to subject myself to that. So we're not going to meet him. If you want to be close to the guy, just read _Les Mis_ in the original French, like Sarah," she joked.

"I don't believe her for a second. I'm not even convinced she can speak French."

"I thought you don't like speaking ill of our colleagues?" she jibed.

"Not when they're in the same room I don't. But she can't exactly overhear us now, can she?" Clara challenged.

"Hugo had a _lot_ of mistresses, you know. He cheated on his mistresses with other mistresses."

"Wow. I suppose we _do_ have a lot in common."

"Excuse me!?"

"I'm _kidding_ ," Clara laughed, "I would never cheat on my mistress. My wife, on the hand – she's fair game. Nothing's gonna stand between me and a gang of Parisian prostitutes."

"Except for how you don't have any money."

"I suppose that's my tragedy. Destined to be an impoverished poet for the rest of my days."

"Riddled with venereal diseases."

"What could be more French?"

The Doctor was amused, "I suppose that's a fair point."

"Is that what he died of, then? An STI?"

"Nope, it was pneumonia that got him, at the ripe old age of eighty-three. Older than you, Coo. And he kept womanising for pretty much all of that time."

"Sounds more like you than me, sweetheart."

"How dare you."

"Why was it you got locked in the Tower of London, again?"

"I've been locked in the Tower of London at least two-dozen times, you'll have to be a lot more specific."

"When Charles II got you. I think I heard about this from Amy a very long time ago."

" _What?_ Ugh," she was disgruntled, "Amy wasn't even there… and it was a misunderstanding. So what if I was hauled out of a mansion, naked, after being caught hiding under a woman's dress? That doesn't mean I was up to no good."

"You're absolutely unbelievable."

"That's not even the worst part; you wanna know what her name was?"

"What? Wasn't 'Clara', was it?"

"God, I wish – she was called Matilda, and I'm not happy about being reminded of the whole affair."

"So it _was_ an affair?" Clara challenged, "Yet again you're out there dabbling with the rich elites. This is exactly what I was talking about earlier – you and the king's mistress."

"It is not my fault that women, and sometimes men, just fall in love with me all the time. I've never asked for this."

"I think you're the most degenerate of us all. Perhaps more so than even Victor Hugo. Or me. But I haven't slept with two-hundred women, sadly. Then again, maybe we'll break up and I can go back to my old ways." Henri came out of the kitchen balancing two plates in one hand with a jug of water in the other. He presented them with what looked, to Clara, like a pair of toasties, which she couldn't complain about. The water, on the other hand, didn't look clean at all.

" _Merci_ , Henri," said the Doctor.

"Gérard wants to know if you have any advice for him."

She lowered her voice and Henri leant closer, "Stay safe on July 27th."

"I'll let him know." Henri left them again.

"Did you just pay for our lunch with a tip about the future?" Clara whispered.

"In exchange for the best sandwich in Paris? Absolutely. Gérard's a wizard. See, the thing is, he thinks I'm my own daughter."

"He… sorry?"

"He taught me how to cook, about thirty years ago. It was right after the Time War, actually, and… well, I've always loved Paris. Always thought I might live here one day. Not that I dislike Brighton, but y'know, living in one of those apartments in the Marais and buying fresh bread every day… I forget how much I love it until I come back. Favourite place on my favourite planet. Second favourite place, actually."

"What's your favourite place?" Clara asked, biting into her sandwich, then she nearly dropped it on the plate. "Oh my god."

"What? Are you okay?"

"That's like, the best thing I've ever tasted."

"Dammit, Gérard… he's always been a better cook than me…" she complained, "I don't know how he does it. And my favourite place is wherever you are because I'm romantic like that. Or maybe… that big junkyard full of decommissioned phone boxes."

"What if I was in the junkyard of decommissioned phone boxes?" Clara challenged.

"Frankly, that would be too much to handle. I'd need to take a cold shower."

"Gross."

The conversation ground to a halt as they both became absorbed in the sandwiches, Clara stunned by tasting the food of the person who'd taught her wife how to cook so well. She was eternally grateful for the Doctor's love of cooking because without it she probably would have starved to death a very long time ago eating only cereal and biscuits. And it really was a very good toastie, even if the French would insist on calling it something weird and fancy. But she still didn't think much of her chances with the water.

"Where's the water from?" she asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

"Fished out of the Seine fresh this morning," said the Doctor, "Water treatment is basically non-existent at the moment. There are sewers, but the waste just goes back into the river." Clara was very glad she hadn't drunk it. "Do you want me to try and get you something mildly alcoholic that'll be a little cleaner?"

"No, I'll just jump in the Seine if I get too thirsty."

She smiled, "Okay, well, just let me know. I'm sure they have some beer they won't mind parting with, but you won't get so far with the wine."

"What's the rest of this story with Gérard, then?"

"Oh, right. I just came to Paris after the Time War to… I don't know, get away from everything? It was a hard time… I got thrown out of a hotel for not having any money or paying the bills and ran into this guy when he was a lot younger, and he berated me for not having a job or knowing a trade. So I said, 'why don't you teach me a trade then?' and he taught me how to make an omelette. And second was the croque-monsieur, though I can't help but think I've been misremembering the recipe… I'll have to check with him. Anyway, par for the course, I had to ditch, came back four years ago because… y'know. Said I was my daughter and 'the Doctor' is a weird, family nickname. I think he knows I'm the same person, though, even if he can't explain it."

"This was all a lie wasn't it?"

"I don't know what you mean," she said unconvincingly.

"We're not here to eavesdrop, are we? We're here so you can get a free sandwich from an old friend of yours."

"I think we've bided enough time for the execution to be done with," she said, which was basically an admission of guilt. Clara couldn't say she minded too much, not when she also got such a good sandwich (even if she didn't have a drink to go with it.) "I also wanted to go on a date with you."

"I'm flattered. So, you _do_ have a plan of where we're going after this?"

"Talk to an old friend of mine. Different old friend to Gérard. Well, acquaintance… hurry up with your food." Typically, the Doctor had already finished eating because her manners had never developed beyond talking while chewing and trying to consume food as quickly as physically possible.

"You have what's left, I already had all that yoghurt earlier." She was more than happy to finish Clara's sandwich for her, wolfing it down in a matter of seconds.

"Maybe I should get something to go? Give it to Jenny?"

"Because that's just what Jenny wants, a cold lump of ham and cheese you've been carrying around for however long it takes us to get what we need," Clara said sarcastically, "Bring her another day. Borrow her ship so it'll actually go to the right time and place."

"The TARDIS brought us here for a reason," she reiterated, "She always takes me where I need to go. And right now, I need to go find a way into the apartments above the porticos so we can sneak into this party."

Sneaking into the upper rooms of the Palais-Royal, or Palais de l'Égalité as the patrons called it, wasn't very hard at all. There wasn't any security – though most of the men they passed were carrying swords – and there certainly wasn't a guest list. It may be a palace, but opening it to the public had certainly let the degenerates in, and they existed in the stifling upper floors in droves. All they had to do was find an open door and walk right in, everybody was too drunk to realise they were strangers. It was a 'more the merrier' situation, and Clara realised that Madame Tussaud had been right: the parties never stopped at the Palais-Royal. It was also dirtier in there than she'd imagined. Probably because it was open to so many vagabonds from the streets as well as frightened aristocrats, but there were many stains on the deep, red carpets and cream-coloured walls that she didn't think she wanted to know the origins of. They mostly looked like vomit.

"Does nobody clean in here?" Clara asked.

"With the Duke of Orléans imprisoned in Marseilles at the moment? I doubt it." Out of nowhere, a splurge of vomit fell from above, the Doctor pulling Clara out of the way as it splashed onto the rug at their feet.

" _Pardon, Mademoiselles!_ " an upper-class man called from the balcony above them. He'd just leant over it and puked onto the ground floor. A woman next to him tittered and took him by the arm, leading him away.

"Well, then," said the Doctor, "You wanted Parisian debauchery, so here you go."

"Reminds me of my student days. Someone once pissed in the hallway outside of our flat."

"Then I'm sure you'll fit right in here. Come on, at least if we're upstairs we avoid the risk of another ' _gardez l'eau_ '… watch out for any signs of animals."

" _Animals_?"

"If there are animals here we're leaving."

"…Okay," Clara stopped in the hallway, trying to ignore an elderly aristocrat trying a proposition a young man for sex near the window, "Who are we going to see in here?"

"…First of all, I'm _not_ friends with him, alright? I know him because I came here with River before and she ditched me when he invited her to his room-"

"Who?"

"Um…" she paused for a while, "The Marquis de Sade."

"Sorry? The Marquis de Sade from 'sadism'?"

"Yeah, that's the guy."

"The rapist paedophile?"

"Uh-huh." Clara stared at her. "Look, I don't like it any more than you do, but he'll have the information we're looking for. Besides, if the crime is what's bothering you, they're going to arrest him again in another two months."

"It's just that I try not to hang out with rapists and pedos. You know, as a rule."

"Coo, that Glove is very dangerous, and I have a bad feeling about all of this. If talking to Sade helps us out, then I'm going to talk to Sade. You can always go back to the Café de Foy and I'll talk to him on my own?"

"God, no," Clara shook her head, "I'm staying with you if you're going to find this nutter…"

"So long as you don't run off with him like Song did… not that she stuck around, I heard later that she escaped from his bedroom through a window; who knows what he was getting up to that made _her_ want to leave. She's not exactly vanilla. Not like you."

"Thanks," Clara mumbled, unsure whether to take this as a compliment.

"Then again, I think if the people here found out your internet search history, you'd probably be locked up in the same places as the Marquis."

"Well, luckily the people here don't know what the internet is, so I think I'm safe."

"Imagine if they knew about your _Playboy_ s."

"Yeah, okay… watching porn isn't the same thing as being in a room full of people fucking, by the way," she said, because that was exactly the type of room they found themselves in as they explored the upper floor, and she tried to avert her gaze. It wasn't very hard because she wasn't particularly interested in what the people were up to, but she still felt like a wallflower.

"Well, I mean…" the Doctor glanced around at bodies stretched across divans, chairs, and a billiard table nobody was using for billiards, "I don't think they mind." None of them were paying _any_ attention to anything except their conquests.

"I see why you didn't want to come here with your daughter now."

"Eurgh, could you imagine? I don't really want to be here at all. But don't let people know you're not digging the vibe, if there's one thing you don't wanna do, it's spoil the mood at an orgy. They are _not_ happy when you do that, trust me."

"How many orgies have you gate-crashed, exactly?"

"You may or may not be surprised at how many lost aliens find themselves in places like this. Plus, I've known Captain Jack for a _long_ time. Hold on." She paused in the room and Clara got kicked by a stray foot and shifted away from a couple. "Do you hear that?"

"Hear what? Grunting and moaning?" That was all she could hear.

"I can hear a violin…" she continued to walk and Clara hastened to follow because she felt someone trying to grab her and didn't want to look to see who it was. Again, she thought, it reminded her a lot of student halls.

"Can't believe you're not more perturbed by this."

"It's nothing I haven't seen before. Usually when I open the browser on your phone-"

"Alright, shut up now. You and I both know that _you_ are filth, so you can stop having a go at me," she complained. A woman leaning upright against a wall with someone's head between her legs cursed at Clara and told her to be quiet. So much for not spoiling the mood of the orgy. The Doctor took her hand and led her out of that room, the woman being pleasured glaring at her as she left, but the next one wasn't a whole lot better. "Think I'm too old for this now. Maybe when I was twenty I would've cared a bit more."

"You're telling me. Y'know, one of the charges levied against Queenie out there was allegedly arranging orgies in Versailles."

"What? This is against the law?"

"It's actually a funny story; because this building belongs to the Duke of Orléans, the police aren't allowed in to arrest anybody. So it becomes a hotbed of all sorts of illicit activity, hence all the drunkards, the gambling, the prostitution, and this up here," she explained, "The cops have absolutely no authority to act. I think the violin is coming from this room."

"It smells like shit," said Clara, "Literally."

"I'd try not to think too hard about that."

"This is worse than when we met James Joyce."

"Don't remind me…"

"Also in Paris."

The Doctor disengaged from this conversation, not wanting to be reminded of some of the details that had been unceremoniously shared with them by Nora Barnacle. But the room they entered wasn't much of an escape from that memory. Clara recognised the Marquis de Sade from pictures, paintings and portrayals of him, and there he was in all his glory, dressed in fineries that had seen better days and were sullied and torn. He was whipping a man lying on a bed, bound and gagged. The source of the smell was a bucket sitting next to an overflowing chamber pot. There was also a goat standing near the window, and next to the goat a girl playing a melancholy tune on the violin, seemingly indifferent to the other happenings in the room.

"Well, well, well," Sade looked up from what he was doing, "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"You owe me a favour," said the Doctor.

"Do I now?" he glanced between her and Clara. The girl continued playing the violin uninterrupted. "I never forget a face. But I don't recall yours."

"Maybe it's changed."

Sade laughed, "Then tell me, for what am I indebted?"

"It's not really a debt, it's more, you tried to sleep with my wife about thirty years ago and I wasn't too happy about it at the time. She jumped through your window to get away. I was taller, and… male." He stared at her. "I'm the Doctor."

"Oh, _yes_. With the chin."

"That's the one… was she alright? It was a long drop."

"She was fine."

"Didn't bring her this time?"

"We broke up."

"And you have a new girl?" he eyed Clara, "A new girl for a new body. How do you do that? What's the trick?"

"Nothing I can disclose, sorry."

"Your arrogance precedes you, Doctor. I can tell who you are from that alone. I think I found the old face more exciting." He dropped his whip on the bed and stepped down to approach them, smirking. "Who might _this_ beauty be, though?"

"This is Clara," the Doctor introduced her, "And she's not a fan of you, so don't try your luck."

"People _always_ say they dislike me, but I think they're frightened of me. They're frightened of desire, of pleasure," he said, approaching her.

"Yeah, well, you can keep your desire and pleasure well away from me, thank you very much," Clara said, taking a step back towards the door. She couldn't stop thinking about what the goat was doing there, even though she desperately did not want to know what the goat was doing there. He kept looking at her for a long time, practically leering, until turning his attention back on the Doctor.

"Perhaps I can help you. In return for letting me borrow your wife for a few hours, all those years ago, _Madame_." Sade had an unpleasant aroma floating about his person. "How can I be of assistance?"

"I need to get to the bottom of some rumours."

"This new accent is delicious. Which rumours? _Many_ whispers pass across these lips."

"I heard there was a plot to try and break out Marie Antoinette from the Conciergerie."

"Ah, _la Conciergerie_ , I know it well, _mes amies_. A man was executed just this afternoon for having a hand in the plot, was he not? And I saw the Queen's head fall myself." Sade paced up and down slowly in front of them. The man on the bed didn't make a sound or move an inch, the violin kept playing, and the goat began to chew on the curtains.

"But do you know any details?"

"The Queen is dead."

"I don't care about that, I care about who was plotting."

"Do you work for Robespierre now?" he half-joked.

"No, but I'm concerned that it might be a bigger scheme than it looks. If you can tell me who was involved-"

"I don't know any names, only stories of certain disgraced noblemen attempting to install the young Louis-Charles to rule France. An organisation. A secret society, perhaps, of trusted confidants of Louis Capet. _I_ would not be privy to such talk, working for the _Convention nationale_."

"Wait, you're on the National Convention?" Clara asked.

"Indeed, I am."

"Don't you have to be elected to that?"

"And I was."

She turned to look at her wife, " _He_ was elected democratically to government?"

"That's politics for you," the Doctor shrugged.

"I am a man of the people, _mademoiselle_ ," Sade smiled at her, a sinister expression behind his eyes.

"Do you know anything else about this secret society?"

"The dregs of the aristocracy, clinging to the _Ancien Régime_ with a death grip. But I have heard that they were in contact with the Queen and that the young man who died today had nothing to do with the Hapsburgs."

"What about where they meet? They must meet _somewhere_."

"Behind closed doors, I imagine. Doors even I have been unable to penetrate. Perhaps you will have better luck? You do love to play both sides, _monsieur_." He was so slimy Clara could hardly stand to be in the room with him, and that was saying something.

"Okay, well, I think we'll be leaving now."

"Are you sure? You're more than welcome to stay if you take off these rags," he said.

"No, thanks," said the Doctor.

"I actually have a question, come to think of it," Clara was suddenly reminded of something she'd been talking about earlier that afternoon, with Sarah. A rumour that would most certainly have graced the ears of the Marquis de Sade, and which he might know the truth about. "Do you know if the dead Queen ever dabbled with women?"

"Oh, for-" the Doctor was annoyed, "Really?"

"I just want to know what's true. I can't ask _her_ , can I?" Clara said. Well, not unless they found that Glove she couldn't. The Doctor shook her head.

"I couldn't possibly say for sure," said Sade, "But I have heard more than a few murmurings about the Princesse de Lamballe. And many more stories about the fate of her head and body." Clara regretted bringing this up. It seemed Sade didn't know anything concrete about the matter.

A woman's piercing scream interrupted the encounter, coming from somewhere outside the bedroom Sade and his 'friends' were occupying.

"It sounds as though _someone's_ having a good time, even if you two aren't," he jibed. Clara didn't think it sounded like a scream of pleasure at all, though, nor did the Doctor, and they pushed their way out of the room as quickly as possible to investigate. The woman's screams were joined by a cluster of male shouts, all coming from another bedroom, the door of which was ajar. The Marquis de Sade followed them as well, and they were right – it was _not_ the scream of someone having fun.

In the room a woman, clearly a prostitute, was shrieking as a young man half-dressed in a soldier's garb was threatened by two men wearing all-black brandishing swords at him. A third sword lay on the floor nearby, along with a pair of boots, a hat, and a chest the Doctor recognised as none other than the chest containing the Right Glove they were searching for. And the soldier being threatened was Jacques, who'd been in the middle of getting up to no good with his hired hand, charged with making sure the Glove made it back to Robespierre in one piece. Clara and the Doctor (and the Marquis de Sade, whose smell followed him through the palace) watched in horror.

"You can't take that, it belongs to the Committee of Public Safety," Jacques argued. He tried to get to his sword but one of the men slashed at him with theirs and cut a deep gash in his upper arm. He winced and grabbed the wound to put pressure on it. "Monseigneur Robespierre will have your heads for this! You'll be at the guillotine within a week!" One of them put his sword back in his sheath to pick up the chest underneath the window, opening it carefully to check it contained what they were looking for.

"The _Gant droit_ is here," he announced.

The first of the men, who were dressed so that their identities were disguised completely, laughed coldly and told Jacques, " _Longue vie à la Reine_ , _sieur_."

" _La Reine est morte_ ," Jacques spat at them.

"Treason!"

"It seems you've discovered the remnants of the _Ancien Régime_ on your own," Sade said quietly behind them, then he laughed a little, "I'm glad to be of service. _Bon chance_ , Doctor. Clara. Come and see me whenever you like." He slinked away, back to his room to carry on committing sex offences. Clara was glad to be rid of him.

"Robespierre's toy belongs to us now," the Royalist continued.

"He'll kill me if I lose that thing, you can't take it, please," Jacques began to beg.

"I'll save him the trouble." Without hesitation, the Royalist leader ran his sword through Jacques and the wailing woman in the corner of the room fainted at the sight. Jacques was stabbed straight through the heart, succumbing to the injury rapidly as the sword – now coated in gruesome viscera – was withdrawn. He coughed up some blood and keeled over onto the floor; no medicine available in the 18th century would save him from that wound. " _Dépêchez-vous, allons-y_."

The Doctor grabbed Clara's arm and made to drag her away as they turned to leave but was a few seconds too late. The two Royalists, now in possession of the Right Glove, had seen them.

"Stop there! Or you'll meet the same end as him!" Clara knew that she would survive being stabbed, and her wife likely would too even if she had to regenerate, but she would rather avoid both of those outcomes if possible. "Who are you? What have you seen?" The duo barged out of the bedroom to brandish their freshly-bloodied swords at Clara and the Doctor.

"I know about the Glove," the Doctor blurted out, both of them holding up their hands in surrender, "I know what it does."

"Why? Do you work for Robespierre as well?"

"N-no, I'm a traveller, I'm from the newly-founded United States," she said, "I'm not French at all. I have no loyalty to Robespierre or the revolution. And in fact, I left the States, because I… disagree with them. See, I love monarchies. Can't get enough of them. That's why I came to France, to see if… I could stop the same thing happening twice. _Longue vie à la Reine!_ " Clara desperately hoped she knew what she was doing, but she'd been with the Doctor for long enough to know that that probably was not the case.

"They know too much, Dubois," the man carrying the chest containing the Glove said.

"What does it do?" the leader, Dubois, challenged, " _Le Gant droit_?"

"Brings people back from the dead," she said seriously, "For a short amount of time."

"Perhaps you know something," he laughed, "It does much more than that, _mademoiselle_."

"How do you know that?" asked the man with the box.

"Silence, Leclerc. If they want to help the Queen…"

"We do," said the Doctor quickly, "Want to help her, I mean."

"Who am I to begrudge a lost American the opportunity?" Dubois drawled. Leclerc didn't appear too happy about this, shifting uncomfortably. "Give the American the box. We will both draw our swords, just in case. If nothing else, Beaulieu can entertain himself with them."

"Great…" Clara muttered. And here she thought the Marquis de Sade was bad. Leclerc begrudgingly pushed the chest into the Doctor's hand and then drew his sword as well.

"Sounds good," said the Doctor, "We'll go with you." Clara wasn't sure that getting themselves kidnapped by the Royalists wasn't the _best_ way to uncover their plot, but, well… it was _a_ way, she supposed. And as long as she kept her wits about her, telekinesis and intangibility were more than a match for a few swords.

So it was as prisoners of a pair of Royalist conspirators, Dubois and Leclerc, that they were forced out of the Palais-Royal and hopefully towards the truth.


	31. Vive la Révolution - Chapter 5

_Vive la Révolution_

 _5_

The Parisian sewers were not quite as disgusting as initially feared. The tunnel system beneath the Rue Montmartre existed, the Doctor knew, primarily as drainage for rainwater. They were still about a century away from the widespread installation of flushing toilets in homes, people were still doing their business in chamber pots and dumping it into the river, so that was something; there wasn't the unbearable smell of putrid faecal matter to deal with. It still wasn't a nice place to be, though, and especially not when they were being marched at sword-point through the depths. Like the Doctor had been made to carry the chest with the Glove in it, Clara had been instructed to carry a lantern that had been left near the street level entrance, as Dubois and Leclerc continued to threaten them. It said a lot about the revolution that nobody thought twice about them walking like this all the way from the Palais-Royal to the sewer entrance. Things took a turn for the strange though when they found themselves listening to a conversation between the Royalists about a woman.

"I can only say this so many times; you need to _tell_ Esmée how you feel," Dubois told Leclerc as he whined.

"But she's low class," said Leclerc, "It would never work. Her father is a baker by trade – but what is there to bake anymore? He's taken up arms like the rest of them. When order is restored, Monsieur Desmarais will be executed like the rest of the sans-culottes."

"You can have fun with her before any of that happens, and then you won't have to stop by her shop any longer."

"I don't know how you can throw away women like this. Esmée and I have a connection."

"You haven't _connected_ with anything, that's the problem. You'll forget about her as soon as you finish. You won't even remember her name."

"You're wrong. I'm not like you and Beaulieu, I want a wife. I want Esmée Desmarais to be my wife, for her to be Madame Leclerc," he sighed wistfully.

"You shouldn't let her class stop you," Clara interrupted. They stopped walking and looked at her. "I mean… if it's true love, with you and Esmée, then unfortunate circumstances won't change anything, will they? If they do, then maybe it isn't meant to be."

"…You see, Dubois? Women have more to offer than you think they do." The Doctor didn't look happy about Clara inserting herself into their conversation.

Dubois laughed as they began to walk again, "All they have to offer can be found between their legs, and they have _nothing_ between their ears to make up for it."

"No. Esmée says the most wonderful things…"

"And _you_ don't say a word!"

"I think you should tell her," said Clara, "What's the worst that can happen?"

"The worst that can happen!?" Leclerc exclaimed, "She laughs in my face! Humiliates me! I would never be able to show my face in St. Germain again."

"Why would you want to, if not to see her? It's a wretched place," said Dubois.

"I don't think she would _laugh_ at you," said Clara, "The worst is she rejects you, but that's no different to where you are now."

"You're wrong, _mademoiselle_. Now I have hope. How can I give my darling Esmée the chance to rip that from my hands?"

"That's what love is," said the Doctor, now getting involved, "Opening yourself up to the potential of heartbreak, but also something wonderful. It's about vulnerability."

"Eh, they make some points," Dubois shrugged, "If you want to marry her, marry her."

"That's easier said than done! Just ' _marry her_ ,'" Leclerc shook his head.

"If you think it will make you happy, then do it. Although I don't see the point. I couldn't have a woman in my life every day. Every night is enough," he smirked. He clearly fancied himself a lothario.

"When the monarchy is restored, she will stop loving me."

"What does she know of you? Does she know about this?" Dubois sounded angry now.

"Of course not! She knows nothing of me, other than my name, and my status, which she cares for as little as her father."

"I think she sounds nice," said Clara, "Tell her you like her."

"Well I can't do it _now_ ," Leclerc argued bitterly, "She isn't here right now."

"She could be," said Dubois, "You might have accidentally told her what you're doing today. She might come looking for you."

" _Non_ , she rarely goes north of the river."

"Not even for her fancy man?" Dubois jibed. Leclerc grimaced. "Is it a left or a right here?"

"It's that way," Leclerc pointed right, and they advanced deeper into the large tunnels with Clara still holding the rusty lantern aloft. "Please, what should I say to Esmée?" he entreated Clara, "What should I tell her?"

"Whatever you tell her has to come from your heart," she said, "That's all that's important, honestly."

"Are you married?" he asked her.

"Uh… yes," she said awkwardly, "I am…"

"And you?" he prompted the Doctor.

"Oh, we're together, her and I," the Doctor indicated Clara.

"Ah, my sister is the same way," said Leclerc. "A woman does know the best way to a woman's heart." That was surprisingly liberal; Clara didn't want to be kidnapped _and_ subjected to homophobia.

"Enough of that talk," said Dubois, "If Vermette is here, he'll only get riled up. I'm not listening to him talk about the boys he finds in the city again. He's going to catch something."

" _Oui_ , probably…"

A wrought-iron gate was built into an alcove in the wall of the round tunnels, lights coming from within indicating more lanterns. Dubois knocked on the gate with the hilt of his sword and another man appeared behind it.

"Do you have it?" he asked, then spotted Clara and the Doctor, "Who are these women?"

"Women?" a second voice asked from within the room, and a taller, bulkier, more attractive man elbowed the first one away. He flashed them a grin. " _Bonjour_."

"Stop that, Beaulieu," snapped Dubois, "They're not interested in you. The blonde one tells us she knows things about _le Gant_. They say they want to witness what we're doing."

"I've got something they can _witness_ ," he smirked. Apparently they'd run into the French doppelganger of Captain Jack Harkness, or something. Beaulieu was pushed out of the way again by the scrawnier man who'd initially come to the gate, and it was him who finally dragged it open to let Dubois, Leclerc and the Oswalds into the room. Leclerc pushed them inside as the unnamed man snatched the chest out of the Doctor's arms.

"Excuse Guillaume," said Dubois, "He doesn't know how to treat women, either." This dig was aimed at Leclerc. " _Où est Vermette_?"

"He's gone to fetch the head," said Beaulieu, "He's late." Guillaume ignored them and opened the chest after setting it down on a table.

"Oh my god!" Clara exclaimed when she saw what was resting on the wooden table against the far wall of the room: a fresh, female corpse. It was, of course, the body of Marie Antoinette, and one of the other conspirators, Vermette, was off retrieving her severed head from Madame Tussaud. But it got the Doctor wondering about Jenny – where had she and Matilda ended up? Had they gone back to Tussaud, and if so, what would happen when Vermette arrived, unless he already had? Had they followed the body on its route from the guillotine to the sewers? At least they hadn't gotten themselves captured as well…

"Where did you put the papers, Beaulieu?" Guillaume asked, removing the Glove from the chest and lifting it to examine it in the flickering candlelight of another lantern. Leclerc took the lantern from Clara and went to hang it up on the opposite wall, illuminating the pasty corpse even more. At least it wasn't old enough to start stinking, she'd barely been dead for an hour. There was still some blood trickling from her neck stump.

"I have them," Dubois said, reaching into his coat.

"What do you know of the Glove, _mademoiselle_?" Guillaume asked the Doctor when Dubois handed him a bundle of letters. Leclerc gestured for them to go over to the corner away from the body so they couldn't mess with the proceedings.

"It's dangerous," said the Doctor, "Using it carries consequences."

Dubois laughed, " _Mais oui_ , the consequences are what we need." The Doctor didn't think they understood the Glove or its power.

"If Robespierre can use it, it can't be too hard," said Beaulieu, leaning on the wall and staring at them in a way that was intended to be seductive, but he looked a bit like he had something in his eye.

"That Glove – it's not – it's not from here. It's not from this planet."

Guillaume laughed, "Then where is it from?"

"…I don't know, but it's from another world."

"It was crafted by the hand of God himself, and it is God who chooses who sits on the throne of France, and it is with God's grace that we use it tonight," said Guillaume. Of course they were religious. Atheism was something the Revolution had made trendy, so they certainly wouldn't be that. The Doctor knew she wasn't going to get through to them – to someone like that, the things the Glove did _would_ seem like proof of a higher power. It was a power nobody should possess, though.

"Maybe you should…" the Doctor whispered to Clara, though they were clearly audible by everyone in the room, "Y'know… force choke." They wouldn't know what that meant.

"I'm all for choking, ladies," said Beaulieu smarmily. Leclerc scoffed at him.

" _Now_?" asked Clara.

The Doctor was about to implore her to do just that, to knock out all five of them telekinetically so they could swipe the Glove for themselves, Queen be damned. But what Dubois asked next threw a wrench in this plan.

"Are you sure we don't need both of them?" he asked Guillaume.

"Nobody knows where _le Gant gauche_ is, except the Queen," said Guillaume, "And she never wrote it down. She will only tell us the rest of her instructions directly."

"Wait," the Doctor interrupted, "Did you say… the Left Glove?"

"They do come in pairs, no?" Beaulieu said.

"But – it's here? The other one? There are two of them, in Paris?"

"Weren't you listening?" Guillaume snapped, "Only the Queen knows where it is."

"The Queen… _she_ gave you instructions to use the Glove?" the Doctor stared at the body.

"She penned these words herself, _mademoiselle_ ," Guillaume held up the documents Dubois had given him.

"But… but that means… _that means_ -"

She was cut off by shouting and the sounds of a scuffle in the sewer tunnels. Dubois, Leclerc and Beaulieu all made for the gate as quickly as they could, though Guillaume remained preoccupied with the notes and the Right Glove.

"Don't touch me! What have you done with the Doctor!?"

"Oh, for…" the Doctor muttered, then called loudly, "Jenny, don't fight them! It's fine! It's sort of fine, I don't know…"

"Doctor!?" Jenny shouted back. It took four grown men to drag Jenny, kicking and screaming, into the room, including a newcomer she assumed was Vermette.

"I found her and the girl lurking in the tunnel," Vermette said.

"The – did you bring Mattie down here!?" Clara exclaimed.

"Where was I meant to leave her?" Jenny protested.

"Just calm down, Jenny, alright? Chill out," the Doctor told her seriously. She grimaced and finally stopped fighting so the men would let her go – though Beaulieu took longer than he needed to to do so. Matilda appeared in the doorway holding a large, bloody sack. All of them, again save for Guillaume, drew their swords. Clara, Jenny, the Doctor and Mattie all had a blade pointed right at them.

"What's going on?" asked Dubois, the de facto leader, "You say you know about the Glove, then you have two girls follow us down here?"

"I didn't… why are you here?" the Doctor asked Jenny.

"We saw them take the body from the grave, followed them to the Rue Montmartre and waited in a café until we saw four of you go inside. To rescue you from these men with swords," Jenny explained.

"Um…" Mattie began, "What's in this bag?"

" _Merde!_ " exclaimed Vermette, going to take it from her immediately and nearly dropping his sword. He took it straight to Guillaume and dumped it on the table next to him. "Why haven't you killed these women, Dubois?"

"They know about the Glove," Dubois repeated.

"So does Robespierre, why should that mean anything?" Vermette argued, "Kill them and be done with it. Start with the girl, she's the weakest."

"No!" Clara shouted, "Don't you hurt her, I'm warning you."

"Or what?" Vermette frowned and pointed his sword at Matilda, who was terrified, "You don't have any weapons."

"I'll die before you can touch her," Clara threatened. Vermette was indifferent.

"So be it." The situation had turned on its head very quickly. On his way back from retrieving the head, Vermette must have run into Jenny and Mattie hiding in the sewers, after they had followed the others. And he was more heartless than even Dubois, at least towards women, and raised his sharpened sword to slash at Clara hard enough to remove an arm, gut her, or even chop off her head if he aimed it just right. Regardless, the outcome was death, and she felt for sure it was coming as he brandished the blade above her head.

"Stop!" Guillaume objected, and Vermette froze just before he could swing.

" _Quoi_?"

"The notes, they have specific instructions about who must use the glove."

"They don't say Couture has to do it, do they? He's dead," said Dubois.

"No, they say it needs to be… someone with a lot of empathy," Guillaume frowned as he read the papers under the light of the lantern.

"Empathy?" asked Dubois.

" _Oui_ , someone… 'kind' must use it. Someone with a heart," he said, then his eyes rested on Clara, "If this stranger is so willing to die for the girl, she must be very kind indeed."

"No," said the Doctor firmly, "No, you're not using that thing – it's dangerous. I heard it almost killed Gwen Cooper."

"You'll do what we say, or we'll kill the others," said Vermette.

"You should do what he says," Leclerc said to Clara, lowering his voice, "He's very upset today, after Couture." Couture must have been the alleged Austrian conspirator whose execution they had witnessed immediately upon arrival in Paris. "And you'll get to do your part! _Longue vie à la Reine!_ "

"It's not a good idea," said the Doctor firmly.

"There's no choice," said Clara. Swords didn't scare her, nor did the Glove for that matter, she could turn intangible and phase through solid objects. But the Time Lords? They could survive a lot of things, but not a decapitation, which those blades were more than capable of. "If we need the Queen to tell us where the Left Glove is, then I guess that's that…"

Beaulieu cleared his throat, "The Queen, Guillaume."

"Hm? Oh," Guillaume put down the notes and opened the sack Vermette had brought with him and somehow briefly pawned off on Mattie, removing from it the grisly, severed head of Marie Antoinette, still wearing bits of plaster Madame Tussaud had used to make the death mask. They must have waited until Tussaud was done with that to steal the head back for themselves.

"Clara…" Mattie began.

"It's alright, sweetheart," said Clara, "Just stay there, everything will be fine."

"I doubt that," said Vermette.

"Vermette," began Beaulieu, "We have four beautiful women in our midst. Do you have to ruin everything just because _you're_ not interested?"

"Well, you can stop with that, because _she's_ fifteen," Clara said about Mattie.

Beaulieu shrugged, "And?"

"…Okay, I clearly forgot what year it is and what country we're in…" she muttered. Guillaume set the head on the table right where it belonged, lying face-up with severed neck touching severed neck. It was strange to see her without one of the ridiculous wigs she always wore in old paintings.

"You, here," Guillaume ordered Clara. Knowing that they needed the information about the other Glove, because now they knew it was somewhere in Paris they definitely couldn't leave it behind, she begrudgingly did as told, the Doctor, Mattie and Jenny all powerless to help her. Even Jenny, who was still meant to be recovering from her fight with Will Smiles, wouldn't be able to fight off five armed Frenchmen when she didn't even have a sword of her own.

Guillaume had pointed for Clara to stand at the head of the table, which she did, and then held the Glove out to her.

"Put it on," he said, "Or we'll hurt someone you care about."

"I'll do it, alright?" she said, taking the thing. Its metal was icy cold. Under the scrutiny of nine pairs of eyes, she slid the gauntlet onto her right hand, finding the texture within to be even colder and stranger. A faint blue glow came from within the object.

"You place your hand on the back of the head," Guillaume directed her, and this she did.

"And then what?"

"You _search_ ," he said, "You _will_ her back to life."

"It's just… willpower? That doesn't… hold on…"

"You okay, Coo?" the Doctor asked worriedly.

"I can feel something…" she said. The Glove was heating up, and not just from her hand. Placed on Marie Antoinette's severed head, it began to help her do just that, _search_. It was as though she was given access to a whole other world, a world of complete, frozen darkness she could see as clearly as if it were her own thoughts, with a blot of distant warmth and heat she knew she needed to go towards. The Doctor often said Clara worried too much about other people, was too empathetic, and it seemed she was proven correct. It wasn't very difficult at all for Clara to seize the soul of the Queen – if that was what it was – and force it back to life, dragging it free from that dark nether realm and into the head on the table. It felt like she was trying to catch a fish with her hands.

The head's eyes flickered open, still milky and disturbingly pale.

"Don't let go now," Guillaume ordered, "The connection must be made complete."

"Not on my watch," said the Doctor, making to approach, but Vermette held up his sword again in front of her neck. To Clara's horror, the head met her eyes, and smiled and laughed. She jumped out of her skin.

"My boys have done a wonderful job," said the severed head of Marie Antoinette, no worse for wear after it had been removed from the rest of her body by the guillotine. Bizarrely, the fingers of the corpse began to twitch as well. Was it really possible that they would both be revived just from resurrecting the head?

"It'll only last for a minute or so," said the Doctor, "So go on, ask your questions."

"A minute?" asked the head, "Who have you enlisted to do this, Dubois? This girl is an interesting creature. So many years lived, but still so full of life and heart… a minute is the least someone like this could do." Clara felt incredibly uncomfortable, perhaps the most uncomfortable she had ever been in her life.

"They followed us, Your Highness," said Dubois, bowing to her, "They say they know about _le Gant_."

"Indeed! And what, pray tell, do they know?" How long was left of this resurrection until it stopped? Clara could only feel it getting stronger, the glove getting warmer, more and more energy flowing into the cadaver.

"I know it's dangerous, and I know it's from another world," said the Doctor seriously.

"Another world! Which world?" Antoinette asked. The Doctor stayed quiet because she didn't know the origins of the Gloves. "Do you know who fashioned it?" Further silence. "I see."

"And what do you know of it?" the Doctor challenged.

"Everything," she said.

"That's not true."

"Isn't it?"

"Where's the Left Glove?" the Doctor asked.

"You want me to give up my last secret, to you? A Time Lord?" The Doctor's blood ran cold.

"How do you know-"

"Your reputation precedes you, Doctor. I know a Time Lord when I see one." There was a long pause where the Doctor was lost for words, a very rare occurrence. "Both Gloves are needed to complete the process."

"So where's the other one?"

"Are you suggesting I trust you to retrieve it for me? I will retrieve it myself, and nothing less."

"And how are you gonna do that? You're just a head."

"Decapitation is merely a delay, and little else. I can feel my body working already." The head met Clara's eyes again and whispered to her, "You can let go now, _ma chérie_." Clara was alarmed and did just this, removing the Glove as soon as she could. The corpse's arms started to flail more now, crawling across the table in search of something: the head. Seeing a dead body lift up its own head certainly wasn't a common spectacle, but they saw it sit up and hold the head up high enough to maintain eye level with the others in the room – but it turned its gaze on Clara directly. "And who are you? You with so much heart to give?"

"I'm Clara…" she said uneasily, disturbed, "I'm just a traveller. Passing through."

"Indeed you are…" Antoinette's eyes bored into her. She took a few steps back, towards the wall. Swords were still being pointed at her loved ones.

"You plotted this all along, didn't you?" said the Doctor, capturing Antoinette's attention. She manually turned her head. "And Robespierre got wind of it, because he found the Right Glove, and you can't do your scheme without it."

"Correct."

"It wouldn't even surprise me to hear that _you_ founded this 'royalist cult' yourself, all for this purpose."

"I did."

"So you wrote out these instructions, sent these men to do your bidding, thinking they were doing the work of God-"

"Who says I'm not God? Or _a_ God?"

"I do. Unless you'd beg to differ? Tell me who you are."

"My name is Maria Antonia Joseph Johanna."

"That's just who you are right now; what about before? Where did you come from?"

"Guillaume! Where is the sewing kit?" The body turned the head to face him and he jumped at being addressed so sharply, reaching into a pouch from his belt to remove a few items; a large needle and a roll of thread.

"You're not going to sew your own head back on, are you?" Clara asked.

"No, how would you suggest I do that? I can't hold my head still and sew it at the same time. I only have two hands. Guillaume will do it."

"I don't know how to sew." She looked at him, and he bowed his head. " _Je suis tellement désolé_ , Madame la Reine." She tutted and turned her head to scrutinise the other four men, all of whom averted her gaze and looked at the floor.

"Really? None of you? _Merde_ … not even you, Leclerc? Always more in touch with your feminine side. Have you spoken to Esmée?"

" _Non_ , Madame la Reine. And no, also, I can't sew."

"What about these women? You must have brought them here for a reason. _I_ know they're interesting, possibly the most interesting people in all of Paris, but you five wouldn't know that."

"We only brought two of them because they saw us take the Glove, they might be working for the Committee of Public Safety," said Dubois. Antoinette laughed.

"They certainly are not. No, they don't want Robespierre getting the Gloves any more than they want me getting them, despite the fact that they are mine to begin with, I brought them here with me."

"With you from where?" asked the Doctor seriously, but again she evaded the question and cleared her throat, which was quite remarkable considering her throat was cut in half.

"Sorry, how are you talking?" Clara interrupted her again, "Your head isn't connected to your lungs, or diaphragm, and your vocal chords are severed."

"Presuming I have lungs, diaphragms, and vocal chords." Clara was even more confused and looked to her wife and Jenny, but both seemed to be at a loss for an explanation. Then again, the other severed heads had also somehow managed to talk. It must be something to do with the power of the Glove. "If you don't know who I am, why are you here, Doctor? Is your machine nearby?"

"What stories about me have you heard?" she asked.

"About the Oncoming Storm? About the Time Lord Victorious? About _Ka Faraq Gatri_?"

"How do you know that one?" Clara didn't think she'd ever seen the Doctor more unnerved than listening to Marie Antoinette say that phrase. She only smiled, still holding her head up.

"What does it mean?" Clara asked.

"'Destroyer of Worlds,' in native Kaled. The language the Daleks used to speak, a long time ago," she explained, "But how would you know that?"

"You're very famous. Much like Marie Antoinette."

"And are you not her? Are you an impersonator?"

"Of course not! I was raised in Vienna."

"But… this…"

"Can any of you sew, or am I going to have to stay here all day? You're running out of time to save her, you know."

"For god's sake, I'll sew it back on," Clara sighed. _She_ knew how to sew, at least. She was quite sure Jenny and the Doctor did as well, though the Doctor wasn't very good at it, but they weren't jumping at the opportunity to haphazardly stick a severed head back onto a body. Guillaume gave her the needle and thread. First she'd pulled a candle out of an eye socket that day, and now this… if only she could tell Sarah this story.

"How much time? What do you mean?" the Doctor reiterated as Clara threaded the needle.

"Who are you?" Antoinette ignored the Doctor and asked Clara, though it was tricky to tell that she was speaking to Clara because she had to keep her head very still now, resting it on the stump. "Her newest companion? Assistant?"

"Both of those things, and more," said Clara, sticking the needle into the grey skin. It wasn't pleasant, and also difficult considering unlike fabric, she couldn't get to the inside of the neck to do the other side. Well, not without turning intangible, but she didn't think it was the best time for that.

"She's my wife," said the Doctor.

"Oh, of _course_. So young, but so desensitised… You should know, _ma chérie_ , nanogenes are child's play compared to the Gloves." Clara accidentally stabbed herself in the thumb with the needle, alarmed.

"What do you mean about running out of time!?" the Doctor shouted at her, getting angrier and angrier about her dodging every single question.

"The _Gloves_. You need them _both_. With only one, resurrection is still possible, but only with a sacrifice. But with two, the process is completed, no sacrifice required. The energy the Glove uses is something far beyond the ability of the nanogenes I can see." She could _see_ the nanogenes? They were so small they were invisible unless they were healing a major injury.

"This is what Robespierre is so desperate for, this is why he killed Couture," said Dubois. Clara had nearly forgotten the Royalists were even there, they'd fallen so quiet listening to the cryptic exchange between the Doctor and the Queen.

"He wants the Left Glove?" asked the Doctor.

"As insurance, to save his pathetic revolution," said Vermette, "If the National Convention can't be killed, they can't be ousted. But the same rule applies to the monarchy."

"So you're saying if we don't get you both of the Gloves, Clara's going to die? You're going to… drain her of life force, or something?" Jenny asked.

"Or something."

"Then tell us where it is, so we can go get it," said the Doctor through gritted teeth.

"If only I trusted you," she smirked, then winced, "Careful with that needle."

"Careful while I _sew your head back on_?" Clara asked incredulously, "And you threaten to slowly kill me?"

"If you hurry up, you might not even notice the effects of our connection. It might be severed with my complete restoration before anything bad can happen to you."

"Or… we could just destroy the Glove," said the Doctor slowly, "I've heard of them being destroyed before."

Antoinette laughed, "And how do you propose to that? You're going to steal a sword and cut it up? Stab it? It's coated in pure cobrian." The Doctor grimaced.

"What's that?" asked Mattie, who, like the Royalists, had barely been able to say a word when faced with this bizarre situation. Clara was debating ordering her to use the emergency teleport and return to the TARDIS, perhaps retrieve help from Rose, or Jack – who'd dealt with the Gloves before.

"Very strong metal. You could probably destroy it with a big gun – do you have a gun?" the Doctor asked Jenny.

"Me? No," Jenny said, "I didn't bring one. You said we were going to the Louvre to look at paintings, and they search you on the way in."

"That's the only reason you didn't bring a gun to the Louvre?" Clara asked her incredulously. She just shrugged.

"I will take you to the Left Glove directly, as soon as your wonderful wife finishes her task."

"Maybe if you shut up…" Clara muttered. The Royalists gave a start, all objecting to her addressing the Queen in this way, though the Queen herself only laughed again. She didn't seem to be taking anything seriously, including her own death and not to mention Clara's, which was apparently looming over them. But Clara was trying not to think about that, or she'd have an existential crisis while she was meant to be sewing.

"Oh, calm down," said Antoinette, "She might die tonight, she can say what she likes. And with such a pretty mouth."

"…I'm just… going to ignore that…" Clara mumbled.

"Please don't flirt with her while threatening to kill her," said the Doctor. "Tell me who you are, what you are, and where you come from. Why you came here, too, while you're at it. _And_ why you've been pretending to be a Viennese princess for forty years."

"I haven't been pretending to be anything or anyone," she said. "But it is such a rare thing to see – the Doctor and her offspring in the same place and time. I've only witnessed it once before." She looked at Jenny as she spoke. It sounded like she'd met them before, the two of them, but they both drew a blank. "Vermette – I'm sick of seeing this sword, put it away. The girl isn't going to attack you." Vermette grunted and did as bade, _finally_ sheathing the sword he'd been aiming towards Matilda for quite a while now. "Take Dubois with you to go and fetch a carriage, we shall need one shortly." They did just this without making a fuss, which was a great relief to Clara because as far as she could tell Dubois and Vermette were the most likely to kill them. Dubois had been the one to kill Jacques the soldier, after all. She didn't think much for Guillaume's bitter attitude or Beaulieu's flirting, but was glad that Antoinette hadn't gotten rid of Leclerc. He was the only one she didn't dislike.

"A carriage to go where?" asked the Doctor.

"To Versailles."

"Versailles!? We don't have time to go all the way to Versailles!"

"I'm _joking_."

"You're-!? Well, don't!"

"I thought you're famous for your sense of humour?"

"I'm famous for a lot of things, like getting rid of obnoxious aliens who won't tell me who they are or what they're doing, but I'm not famous for laughing at jokes that involve Clara's death," she grew louder and louder.

"Sweetheart," Clara began, "Just calm down."

"Calm down!? You're connected to her with that Glove! She's feeding off you, like some sort of vampire!"

"Bit rude," said Jenny, "To vampires, I mean."

"I assure you, I'm not one of those wretched creatures. Cursed to never step foot in the sun? If that was my existence, I wouldn't care for the Gloves at all. I'd rather they let me die. You know, you're not as charming as they give you credit for when you're faced with something you don't understand," Antoinette quipped, then winced. "Ow! What are you doing?"

"Just trying a knot," said Clara defensively, "Unless you want me to leave it so your head just falls off again? Will this heal?"

"It'll happen to you, slowly," said the Doctor, "That's what she's doing."

"Oh, fine," said Antoinette, "The Glove is in the Tuileries, but you shan't find it without me. It's hidden very well. Robespierre hasn't managed to discover it yet, after all. And my dear, what sort of a person would I be if I didn't return the favour of bringing me back to life by freeing the girl from her bondage? Unless she doesn't want to be free."

"I very much do, thanks…" said Clara, passing the needle and thread back to Guillaume.

"Then so it shall be, and we will adjourn as soon as Dubois and Vermette return with a carriage. I can't walk thought he streets like this."

"Sorry – you want to go to the Tuileries Palace? The headquarters of the National Convention?" the Doctor asked "You're gonna walk right in there to get your magic glove? _The headquarters of the National Convention_?"

"We shan't be walking in through the front door," she said, "It will be quite alright." She jumped down from the table quite spryly, Clara watching her head very carefully to make sure it didn't fall off. It was already wobbling a little – she'd have to find a better way to keep it attached. Maybe she could get some bolts, like Frankenstein's monster.

"When was Mary Shelley born?" Clara asked the Doctor.

"Not for four more years. Why?"

"Just wondering if she happened to be hanging around in Paris ready to witness _this_ … thing," said Clara.

"Wouldn't advise wearing any of those wigs in this condition," said Jenny, "Y'know, what with your spine being cut in half."

"Madame la Reine," Guillaume began, "When are we going to gather our allies to seize the throne?"

"I have already determined the best route to get you to safety in Vienna, Your Highness," Beaulieu added.

"What? Oh, yes, we'll think about that later," Antoinette brushed them off, "The Tuileries comes first."

"Shall I send word ahead to our allies in Prussia and Bavaria?"

"No, I will send my own messages with my seal, so they know the truth," she said.

"But the Convention grows more powerful by the day," Beaulieu continued, "There are rumours that the Duke of Orléans is going to be beheaded soon."

"Well, Phillippe should have been more careful."

"It's too dangerous for you to go to the Tuileries, I'm afraid I have to insist."

"I'm afraid I don't care. Monsieur Beaulieu, _le Gant gauche_ is the most valuable object on this planet, far more than every jewel or diamond in all of France, and it belongs to me. Nothing on this rock will prevent me from recovering it, and any further suggestions of this nature will be considered treason."

"I would never-"

"Another word and Leclerc shall be forced to deal with you."

"Excuse me?" asked Leclerc.

"He doesn't have the stomach," said Beaulieu. She glared at him, and he finally stopped talking.

"I do have a stomach," said Leclerc.

"Oh, Fabien," sighed Antoinette, "He means you're a coward."

"I am not! If you want me to stab him, I'll stab him."

"Think for yourself for once," snapped Guillaume.

"You must speak to the girl," Antoinette addressed Leclerc.

"And so I shall! You'll see. If Mademoiselle Desmarais will have me, then I'll stay with her always." Beaulieu made a retching sound to make fun of him, and he crossed his arms and leant against the wall in a huff.

"No woman will ever 'have' a man, they are the property of their fathers and then their husbands," said Beaulieu.

"Perhaps I will stab you myself, Beaulieu," the Queen remarked, "No woman has ever been, nor ever will be, the property of a man. The very idea is an insult, and if you are not more discriminate you will meet the same fate as Couture."

Splashing footsteps became audible in the main sewer tunnel.

" _Mes amies!_ " It was Dubois. "We have secured a carriage!"

" _Fantastique_!" Antoinette smiled, " _Allons-y_!" The Doctor felt her blood begin to boil.


	32. Vive la Révolution - Chapter 6

_Vive la Révolution_

 _6_

The shadowy façade of the Tuileries loomed above them as they stood far beneath it on the northern riverbank of the Seine. It hadn't been a long journey to get there, some of them relegated to walking _alongside_ the carriage Dubois and Vermette had retrieved because it wasn't nearly big enough for all of them, but had involved them crossing the Place de la Révolution and seeing the guillotine illuminated by the moonlight. The only good thing was that nobody would suspect they had the Queen in their midst because she had been publicly executed hours ago. It was a miracle that no Jacobin soldiers stopped them to see inside.

"Sorry, but, how is hanging out by the river supposed to get us into the palace up there?" Matilda asked. She'd gotten progressively _less_ freaked out, getting used to the walking corpse in their company, now the Royalists had stopped actively threatening to kill her. Not that Clara would let them get close; she was trying to avoid using her powers, as she always did, but all bets were off if they went anywhere _near_ Matilda. She hoped Mattie knew that.

"Such little imagination in this girl. Perhaps she should have waited with the carriage as well," the Queen made a joke that didn't land very well with anybody. Namely, because the people who had been left to protect the carriage and horses, pre-empting their need to make a quick getaway, were Vermette and Guillaume, the two Clara trusted the _least_ out of all the Royalists. This left them with just Dubois, Leclerc and Beaulieu. The Queen was the one carrying the Right Glove now, keeping it tightly in her hand but not putting it on.

Antoinette stopped on the edge of the riverbank, moon and stars in the sky, and approached the large, stone wall that made up the flood defences. The second miracle of the night was that her head hadn't fallen off again after Clara's botched sewing job, though the black thread was gruesomely visible, and it did wobble on its perch.

"Don't tell me there's a secret-" the Doctor began to speak but stopped when Antoinette pushed down on a particular brick in the wall, and it began to rumble. "There's a secret door… of course there is…" She lingered very close to Clara now, and in turn so did Mattie, though it was worth noting Clara hadn't yet begun to feel her head getting very slowly chopped off. The secret door built into the Seine bank opened on a lumbering, clockwork mechanism, and Beaulieu and Dubois had to give it a helping hand and push to get it fully open. It was pitch black inside.

"Dubois, stay here and guard this entrance. You're the most competent," Antoinette told him, "Do _not_ shut the door, and if any Jacobins approach, you are to defend this passageway to the death.

" _Oui, Madame la Reine_. To the death, _bien sûr_ ," he nodded and stood aside to guard the entrance.

Also under Antoinette's instruction, Leclerc retrieved a lantern and a tinderbox from the ground within the passage, quickly striking the flint to get enough of a spark to light the candle inside the rusty lantern. It was him who took the lead, Antoinette at his side and the time travellers all clumped together behind them. Jenny lingered closest to the back.

"Thérèse used to hide in this tunnel on occasion," Antoinette commented as they walked through the passage, full of dust and cobwebs.

"Who?" Clara asked.

"The Princesse de Lamballe," the Doctor explained, "Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy."

"I see you know your French nobles," said Antoinette.

"I don't get it, why is every woman in France called 'Marie'?" asked Mattie. A fair question.

"Catholicism, that's why," said the Doctor.

"And she used to call me Antonia," said Antoinette.

"Um, could I just ask-" Clara began.

"Not again with this…" the Doctor complained, "What do you care so much? It's not like you can tell Sarah what you've heard. You can't cite your sources."

"-were you sleeping with the Princesse de Lamballe?" Clara ignored her completely.

Marie Antoinette stopped in the passageway and Leclerc held up the lantern, Beaulieu lingering in the gloom just ahead.

" _Mais oui_ ," she said, "I thought all of France knew about that."

"I'm English," said Clara.

"Oh. That weakens my opinion of you, I must admit. But I suppose it isn't quite as bad as being Gallifreyan."

"I don't know if you got the memo, but the Gallifreyans were never very fond of me," said the Doctor, "What with them putting me into exile more than once."

"What does this word mean – 'Gallifreyan'? It's like nothing I've ever heard," said Leclerc.

"Keep up, Fabien. Gallifrey is a planet," said Antoinette.

"A… planet?"

"Like Earth, here, is a planet. A very fun one, full of little amusements. Gallifrey is stifling by comparison. I suppose that's why you left, Doctor?" The Doctor didn't answer her.

"How is that possible?"

"Planets exist in distant star systems with similar configurations to Earth," the Doctor told Leclerc, "Life develops on them like it developed here."

"By the hand of God, you mean?"

"By the-? No, not by… I don't have time to explain evolution right now… whatever reason you want, there are people who grow and live on completely different worlds. Like your Queen, who won't tell me where she's from."

"Vienna is hardly a different world, though I don't understand the language," he said.

"Don't confuse the poor boy," said Antoinette, "He has a good heart. What did they say when they discovered you'd married a human? A very beautiful human, but nonetheless, a human." Clara, again, was uncomfortable with this statement.

"She's not the first."

"Thanks," said Clara dryly. The Doctor made a start.

"I don't mean – I've lived a long time! I love you." Clara had been kidding, but the Doctor wasn't in the mood for jokes with the threat of the Glove hanging over their head. "I don't care what they think of me. I never have."

"Do you see, Fabien? Class doesn't mean anything," said Antoinette.

"Yes, yes…" he mumbled, "I don't see what you expect me to do. Unless you want me to leave for St. Germain right now to find Esmée?"

"Well, no, there's no need for that," she said, "We're almost at the exit now. Clara's pretty head will be rescued in hardly any time at all."

"What a relief," said Clara sarcastically, "Here I was getting worried about my head falling off."

"The girl is amusing, Doctor," said Antoinette, "An excellent choice."

"I don't care what you think. I don't know who or what you are, and until I do, I don't care about a thing that comes out of your mouth. But you mark my words, I'll pull your head back off myself if anything happens to Clara, and no amount of swords will stop me." Clara touched her arm gently in a meagre gesture of comfort, but until they recovered the Left Glove and prevented the life-drain, it wasn't going to amount to much.

"The door is just ahead. Don't make a sound," Antoinette warned all of them. The passageway ended with a wall covered in more clockwork mechanisms, and she leant close to it to listen. Clara wondered whether her ears actually worked properly. As the Doctor had said, the Tuileries was being used as the main seat of the French government, occupied by more angry revolutionaries than you could shake a stick at. And they were sneaking inside as the entourage of the Queen's reanimated corpse.

Antoinette blew out the candle in Leclerc's lantern, satisfied that nobody was going to witness the door opening from inside the palace, and twisted a crank.

Slowly, the door creaked open – a little too loud for comfort – and they entered an opulently furnished boudoir. Cream and gold with dark green upholstery; a glistening chandelier suspended in front of a four-poster bed; plush, gilded chairs sitting at shimmering tables and desks. Renaissance paintings still hung on the walls; it looked untouched by the revolutionaries.

"Hm. I thought they would have ransacked it," Antoinette commented, scrutinising their surroundings.

"Not until the Paris Commune comes along," the Doctor muttered, looking around at the room, which symbolised the height of decadence. "Should've fled France with the rest of the aristocrats, years ago. Gone to Bavaria like he says," she indicated Beaulieu.

"Watch the door," Antoinette ordered him, pointing to the door that led out into the rest of the palace. She motioned for Leclerc to do the same thing, and he set the lantern on the floor and joined Beaulieu, both of them ready to draw their swords at a moment's notice were they discovered. "Why have they not destroyed it?"

"They hate the Royals, they don't hate history," said the Doctor, "I assume Max wants to preserve it. They do the same thing to Versailles and the Louvre, after all." The Doctor knew that Marie Antoinette's cell in the Conciergerie remained preserved through the coming centuries, as did her private rooms in Versailles. Not to mention the death mask fashioned by Madame Tussaud. "So? Where's the Glove? _Le Gant gauche_?"

"Yeah, um, could we hurry up and grab that, please?" Clara entreated, "Before we're caught and taken to the guillotine." Time Lords wouldn't survive the guillotine, and she wouldn't survive much longer without recovering the other Glove. Antoinette smiled, looking like a ghost in the moonlight spilling through the ornate windows of the bedroom, and turned to approach one of the large paintings fixed to the wall.

"Don't tell me there's a safe hidden behind a painting…" the Doctor began. But of course, there was a safe hidden behind a painting. To open this safe wasn't as easy as pushing the right brick on a wall, however, it required Antoinette to place her thumb on a crest at the base of the picture frame, at which point they heard a humming sound and then a distinctly electronic beep. Biometrics. "Well _that_ certainly doesn't belong in this century." That explained why Robespierre hadn't been able to access it, even if they knew what biometric locks and fingerprint scanners were, without the hand of the Queen, they couldn't get in. Then again, he apparently hadn't been able to find the giant door built into the wall leading to an escape route, either – maybe she was giving him too much credit.

"Why didn't you take your stuff and leave ages ago?" Clara asked her, "If there's a secret passage right here."

"We did try. I was only just able to salvage these possessions and bring them from Versailles," she explained, "Of course, the king is mostly to blame for that failure."

"What failure?"

"The Flight to Varennes," the Doctor leant over to explain, "The Convention moved them from Versailles to the Tuileries, and they tried to escape but got caught because, I don't know, I guess they're idiots."

"I said, the king is to blame," Antoinette insisted. She drew out a handful of objects from within her hidden safe, including the promised Left Glove they so desperately needed. "I miss him, but he was useless. _My_ treasures thankfully haven't met the same fate as the _Armoire de fer_."

"What's that?" asked Mattie.

"Incriminating letters the king wrote that were discovered a year ago," said the Doctor.

"That's a vortex manipulator!" Jenny exclaimed. She was immediately shushed by everybody else in the room. But she was right, it _was_ a vortex manipulator clear as day, the only other thing she drew out.

"Hang on," Clara began, "If you've had a vortex manipulator right there in the Tuileries all this time, _why_ didn't you use it to leave France months ago!? Years ago!? Leave the whole planet, even! You could have avoided this entire escapade and saved yourself from getting executed!"

"How was I to know they would execute me?"

"Because-! Because this is the French Revolution! And you're Marie Antoinette! How do you _not_ know!?"

"I've always found history to be very dull," she said. Clara couldn't believe what she was hearing. "They didn't give me any warning before they stormed in here to drag me to the Conciergerie, and I couldn't open my safe with the National Guard in the room."

"You could have opened the safe and just grabbed the vortex manipulator and left straight away!"

"They surrounded the bed, with _swords_ ," she reiterated, like she was somehow the most logical of them, "Besides, with the Gloves, death isn't the obstacle it would otherwise be. There was no reason to take such a risk. I can't let Robespierre have both Gloves."

"Yes, the Gloves, go on," the Doctor said, "Do that so Clara will be okay."

"As you wish," said Antoinette, holding out the Left Glove to Clara herself, who took it unsurely.

"And… what do I do with this?" she asked, "You're already back to life."

"The same as before, it should respond to you. They've taken to you quite well, they often don't with humans. They're not designed for them." Antoinette sat down in one of her fancy chairs, leaving Clara to slide on the glove. She'd been right, it did respond to her easily; Clara felt the flow of energy pulse through it. The Doctor took a few steps closer but still maintained a distance, Jenny and Mattie staying closer to the secret passage. Clara placed her hand as carefully as she could on the back of Marie Antoinette's precarious head.

Her soul, or consciousness, or essence, or whatever the best word was, had already been dragged back from beyond death by the earlier ceremony with the Right Glove. The Left Glove didn't have as much work to do to. After only a few seconds elapsed there was what felt like an explosion of energy, raw power of some kind, at the tips of Clara's fingers. This was accompanied by the veins snaking beneath Marie Antoinette's dead skin glowing vividly white, and then the bones followed and a strange mesh of internal organs that even the Doctor couldn't recognise when the illumination only lasted for a split-second. It was like the flash of a camera, and when they were plunged back into darkness with the moon pouring into the room Clara felt faint on her feet and collapsed. The Glove dropped from her hand as she fell, but the Doctor was close enough to catch her in time. She wasn't unconscious, only a little woozy.

The door into the chamber was violently and abruptly kicked down. Antoinette jumped from her seat and grabbed the glove from the floor as Leclerc and Beaulieu drew their swords and backed away from the newcomers to defend the Queen. It was a dozen soldiers from the National Guard, clad in blue uniforms all with swords drawn, ready to kill the intruders. Jenny pulled Matilda closer to the secret passage while Clara tried to gather her thoughts. A man pushed through the soldiers to get to the front with a pistol in his hand, pointing it straight at the newly resurrected Queen.

"Max!" the Doctor greeted the leader, "Long time no see!"

"Excuse me? Who are you?" he asked her.

"Oh, we haven't met yet," she said.

"So you _are_ associates of the Tyrant!" Beaulieu gave a start.

" _Bonjour, Monseigneur_ ," Marie Antoinette curtseyed mockingly. Beaulieu and Leclerc stood between her and Robespierre's forces, and she was already fidgeting with the vortex manipulator she'd recovered.

"You can't stop us," Beaulieu argued with Robespierre, "Louis-Charles will take the throne of France, and the Queen will assure it. We will get to Vienna."

"Yes, of course, Vienna," said Antoinette unconvincingly. The Doctor kept a grip on Clara and slowly started to edge them both towards the passageway, just like Jenny and Mattie were doing. Struggling with the inputs, Antoinette dropped the Gloves on the chair in front of her.

"Versailles has been turned inside-out, _Madame la Reine_ ," said Robespierre, "I knew _le Gant gauche_ was somewhere in the Tuileries, and I knew you would lead us to it eventually."

"Seems like the two of you are made for each other," the Doctor quipped, "Have you ever thought about getting remarried now the king is dead? You could be Mrs Robespierre."

"You disgust me," said Antoinette.

"We must leave, Your Highness," Beaulieu hissed at her.

"There is no escape now," said Robespierre, "We have both Gloves, you can't do this trick twice. The monarchy will fall to the revolution once and for all."

"Ha!" Antoinette exclaimed. The vortex manipulator lit up. "I'm afraid I'll have to cut this short and take my leave."

"You won't get far. I have soldiers approaching the Seine as we speak."

"The Seine? You make me laugh," she said, "I won't be going anywhere near the Seine, and you certainly won't be able to follow me."

"Argh! Seize her! Now!" Robespierre grew too frustrated with her trying to weasel her way out of trouble and motioned for his guards to advance.

" _Au revoir, monsieur!_ " she smiled, then looked at Clara, " _À la prochaine, ma chérie_ ," she blew a kiss in Clara's direction and activated the vortex manipulator, disappearing in a flash of blue light. But she did _not_ take the Gloves, they were still sitting on the chair, now in between the National Guard and the TARDIS crew.

" _Madame la Reine_?" Beaulieu's expression was one of utter betrayal as he stared at the space where Marie Antoinette had been seconds ago.

"Kill the traitors!" Robespierre ordered, enraged by the Queen's disappearing act. Beaulieu was distracted for just long enough that one of the soldiers ran him clean through with his sword, his eyes still fixed on thin air. The soldiers advanced as Robespierre aimed his pistol at the only remaining Royalist, Leclerc, with Beaulieu choking and falling to the floor as the sword was withdrawn from his chest. But Clara, fuelled by adrenaline, decided she wasn't going to let Leclerc get shot. Robespierre pulled the trigger, but a blast of telekinesis sent the gun flying into the wall, the ball-bearing missing Leclerc.

"Run, run!" the Doctor shouted, picking up the two Gloves. Jenny and Mattie were first into the tunnel, then the Doctor and Clara last of all, grabbing Leclerc to bring him with them as Robespierre and the soldiers gave chase.

Clara, now stuck at the back of the group as they fled as quickly as they could, became their last line of defence and occupied herself telekinetically tripping up as many Jacobins as possible. The passage was only wide enough for two people side-by-side, so tripping them impeded their progress enough to give the TARDIS crew and Fabien Leclerc a lead. Robespierre continued to shout orders for their execution, but the cries grew more and more distant.

Running so quickly, it didn't take them long to escape from the Tuileries and burst back out into the moonlight at the Seine riverbank, Dubois still standing guard.

"Leclerc! What happened!?" he demanded.

"The Queen is gone, disappeared-"

"Disappeared?"

"There was a light, I don't understand – Beaulieu is dead, the National Guard and Monseigneur Robespierre are in pursuit!" Leclerc told him, panting and panicking.

" _Merde!_ " Dubois cursed, "We must get to Guillaume and Vermette!"

"No, come with us," said the Doctor, "If they haven't been caught already, they're about to me." She made to go east, back towards the Pont Notre Dame and the Hôtel de Ville where they had been that morning, where the TARDIS was, but Dubois wanted to go west towards the carriage waiting for them at the bottom of the Jardin des Tuileries.

"We don't have time for this!" Dubois, ever the pragmatist, abandoned his post as sounds of the pursuing revolutionaries came through the tunnel.

"Come with us or you'll never see Esmée again," said Clara. That was all she needed to say to persuade Leclerc to abandon Dubois and the other Royalists, who were certainly going to be arrested and executed by the Committee of Public Safety, and come with _them_ , as they continued their escape down the Seine.

The revolutionaries burst from the tunnel behind them, splitting off with some following Dubois and some coming after Leclerc.

"There! A boat!" Leclerc shouted, pointing at a small rowboat tied to the riverbank by an old rope. It was empty, derelict, and Clara didn't think much of its ability to function as a boat, but the National Guard was surely surrounding the Tuileries from all sides. They could easily be cut off from ahead. But there were no other boats immediately in sight, so Leclerc's plan was jumped upon.

"In the boat, in the boat!" the Doctor shouted. Mattie and the Doctor got in first, keeping the gloves safe, while Leclerc untied it and Clara sent another telekinetic blast at the approaching soldiers. Leclerc barely made the jump into the boat, but then they were off, Jenny taking the oar and pushing them out into the water. Clara gave a helping hand with telekinesis, aiming them towards the other bank of the river where they'd be out of range of the National Guard's pistols. The soldiers aimed and fired at them from the shore, Clara again protecting them and their flimsy boat from the barrage, but they very quickly got too far away for the men to aim accurately.

"Who are you!?" Leclerc demanded.

"The Doctor, I told you."

"But who!?"

"We're travellers, passing through Paris," she explained, "I have a machine."

"What kind of machine?"

"One that travels through time." The boat sped up and up, moving much faster than the soldiers would be able to keep up with on foot and disappearing into the horizon of the Seine. They approached the next bridge. All they had to do was get back to the dockyard by the Hôtel de Ville and they could escape. "Go to the other shore."

"Why?" Clara and Jenny asked together.

"Because St. Germain is south of the river and that's where his girl is," said the Doctor, then continued talking to Leclerc, "You need to take Esmée and leave Paris, leave France if you can - just get out of here. The chaos isn't going to stop for almost a hundred years, I swear."

"I can't leave France and betray my country," he said.

"You need to if you're going to survive. The revolutionaries won't win and the royalists won't win, things are only going to get worse. If you can't leave France, you _have_ to leave Paris. Go to Toulouse! It's nice there!"

"Leave the greatest city in the world?"

"Do it for love," the Doctor implored him, "Do it for Esmée. I know what happens to France in the future, and it's nothing but chaos for as long as you'll live. Tyrant after tyrant and uprising after uprising – but you can get out, and lay low, and escape the guillotine. None of the temporary politics here are worth dying for, I promise." They approached the southern bank, drawing close enough for Leclerc to stand, balancing precariously. "Please, Leclerc – Fabien – take her and get out of here."

"…Alright. Only because I've seen so many extraordinary things, and you are the only one willing to explain, and my Queen has abandoned me."

"Loyalty to her won't get you anywhere," said the Doctor. Leclerc nodded and made the short jump from the boat to the southern side of the Seine.

" _Au revoir_ , Doctor. Clara," he nodded. Clara smiled at him, "I'm going to go to St. Germain directly and make Esmée my wife or die trying. Toulouse is nice this time of year."

"It is!" the Doctor beamed, "But seriously, go! They'll be right on you! Just grab a horse, go south, and don't look back until you're far away!" He saluted her, which made her groan, and then ran for the nearest flight of steps to get back to street level. Jenny pushed them away from the bank with the oar again and continued to row, Leclerc disappearing from view.

"That was nice," said Mattie, "Saving him."

"If he listens," said the Doctor, picking up the Gloves again.

"What are you going to do with those?" Jenny asked carefully.

"I don't know yet… just get us back to the TARDIS for now. I think we'll be giving the Louvre a miss, after all…"

* * *

"Well?" Clara asked, sitting down with a glass of water in her hand, freshly showered and changed into more comfortable clothes, "What are they?" she prompted.

"Hm… I could be wrong about this, but I _think_ they're gloves."

"…You're an arsehole," she muttered. Oswin smiled at her, looking up from the Gloves she was scrutinising, the gauntlets standing upright on the table in front of her.

"I don't know what they are."

"Do you know how they work?"

"No, but they sound remarkable. Reanimating a severed head? Full motor function preserved even after the brain is completely disconnected from the body? Observable in both human specimens _and_ whatever your French consort was?"

"Austrian," Clara corrected.

"Same thing," Oswin shrugged.

"Not really," said Jenny, sitting nearby. It was only the three of them in Oswin's laboratory on the TARDIS, waiting to gather their allies and have a meeting about the Glove. Though by allies, it was only Jack, and the Doctor had gone to fetch him. Adam Mitchell was watching Matilda elsewhere and trying to help her wrap her head around French grammatical rules since she still hadn't managed to do her homework.

The electronic door slid open and the Doctor returned, still agitated, with Captain Jack hurrying in behind her. He stopped dead when he saw the Gloves in the lab, surrounded by wires and other equipment Oswin was using to study them and work out what they were.

"What are the medical results? Did you get them yet?" the Doctor asked Oswin.

"Yes, all fine, for both of them. Clara isn't being drained of her life, Jenny hasn't rebroken her ribs – though, with my limited medical expertise I'd say some of the soft tissue damage has been exacerbated. Expect some more bruises. Have fun telling your wife about that." Jenny stuck her tongue out at Oswin. Ravenwood wasn't present, she was in London hanging around with Sally Sparrow.

"You're sure?"

"About the bruises?" Oswin asked.

" _No_ , about Clara, about her not dying."

"I feel fine, sweetheart," Clara said again, "Really."

"You should destroy them," said Jack, "When Suzie Costello pulled the same stunt on Gwen, the only way to sever the connection was to destroy the Glove. You can't mess with this sort of technology."

"Tell me about that," said the Doctor, thinking.

"What do you want to know?"

"Did she feel pain? Suzie, when you woke her up."

"Yeah. She was conscious but had a bullet wound in her head. She got more lucid as it started to heal, but I can't say it was pleasant for her at the beginning – not that I have a lot of sympathy." The Doctor frowned.

"The head the soldiers were talking to, Couture's head, was screaming," she remembered, "They couldn't get a word out of it. Stabbed it in the eye. Must be an intense kind of pain, decapitation; in humans, loss of consciousness doesn't occur for a handful of seconds. It's far from instantaneous. Even Jack still feels pain when he heals."

"So what?" asked Clara.

"So Marie Antoinette back there didn't look like she was in any pain at all. A fully conscious, intelligent humanoid, capable of coming back from a decapitation without experiencing extreme pain? What kind of creature is that? I've never seen anything like it. Even the Great Vampires can't survive a beheading."

"Could be a chicken," said Oswin. They all looked at her. "What? Chickens can survive for over a year without their heads."

"…Anyway," Jenny cleared her throat and sat up a little, "I couldn't find anything on the TARDIS about what the Gloves are, at all. Nothing digital. Although, I did manage to get a look at the church records of Toulouse which have all been digitised as far back as 1720 and found a marriage record of one Monsieur Fabien Leclerc to Mademoiselle Esmée Desmarais, dated to the summer of 1794. So they did leave and go to Toulouse. Had four kids."

"Well, that's nice. That's something," said the Doctor, "We should go. I love making wedding cameos. What do you think?" she directed this question at Clara.

"You know I like a good wedding, but maybe not for a while." She nodded, thinking. Jenny began to speak again about her efforts to search for information about the Gloves.

"There could be something on them in the TARDIS library?" she suggested.

"Impossible," said the Doctor, "I've read every book on this ship. If there was anything about these Gloves, I'd know."

"Personally, I'm not sure what studying them will accomplish," said Oswin, "I agree with Jack, they're too dangerous, and I don't want to risk anything happening to Clara either. Plus, they're a bit… dead. None of the machines I'm using are really picking anything substantial up."

"I don't like thinking there's a whole species out there with technology like this and even the Doctor doesn't know what they are," said Jack, crossing his arms, "It's bad news."

"How did you destroy them before?" Oswin asked him. He shrugged.

"Big gun. Toshiko did it. Second one was lost when the base was blown up, buried underneath Cardiff. It brought Gwen back and put Suzie back in the ground. Gwen's never been any worse for wear. Owen was complicated because I was the one who used it."

"Well, she did say you need to use _both_ , so you don't botch the whole process," said Clara, "And she's not human. We don't know what she is."

"If you ask me, it doesn't sound like she's gone for good," said Jenny, "She did look right at you and say, ''til next time, my darling.'"

"Urgh, don't remind me…" Clara mumbled, "She freaks me out."

"Of _course_ Marie Antoinette wants to fuck you…" Oswin quipped, "I suppose it must be very intimate, sharing your life-force like that? You know, I'm struggling to even work out what this life-force, or energy, that the Glove drains _is_."

"We never found that out either," said Jack.

"Life-force…" Oswin repeated, starring at the Gloves, frowning. But Clara was thinking about something else that Jenny had just said, the words Marie Antoinette had uttered upon departure: _À la prochaine, ma chérie_ … and she had called Clara ' _ma chérie_ ' upon waking up, too… And then she remembered where she had heard that before, and jumped to her feet so quickly she knocked over her glass of water. "Hey!" Oswin protested.

"The cake!" she shouted, looking straight at the Doctor.

"What? What cake?"

"At school! In the fridge?"

"The… oh my god, the cake!" the Doctor also shouted.

"Sorry, can someone please explain why we're all so excited about cake?" Oswin asked, looking between them. Everyone else was at a loss.

"We have to go," said the Doctor, holding out her hand to Clara.

"Go where?" asked Jenny, "What about the Gloves?"

"You and Jack take them and throw them into the Eye of Harmony, that should do it," she called on her way out of the room, Clara taking her hand as they left as quickly as they could.

"We'll just adopt Matilda too, shall we?" Oswin asked.

"We'll be back soon! Make sure she's okay!" The door closed behind them and the Doctor bounded down the steps towards the central column in the console room as quickly as she could, Clara at her heels. "I can't believe we didn't see it, didn't think of it at all, all day!" she paced back and forth around the console, flicking switches and hitting buttons to send them into flight. "Pull that lever there and hold it down," she bade Clara, who did just this. The ship jerked. "Well don't hold it down _that_ hard."

" _Sorry_ ," said Clara. The cylinder began to thrum, carrying them out of the time vortex as the Doctor steered. She was very focused as she piloted it now, taking them far away from Revolutionary France and back towards Brighton in October of 2064, home for them now. She didn't say a word as the TARDIS flew this time, the ship rocking and veering this way and that, Clara gripping the console tightly for support. Eventually, it landed, thudding as it stopped.

"Don't go out just yet, I'm running interference on the CCTV," she said, "The last thing we need is getting caught on camera landing a spaceship in our place of work in the middle of the night…"

"Mm, hopefully you got the date right this time. And we haven't appeared in the middle of the day."

"Well, check the monitor if you're worried about that." Clara did this, pulling down the monitor and turning it on to see the TARDIS exterior. She saw the staff room of Turing High, dark and empty in the middle of the night.

"All looks good."

"Well, come on, then," the Doctor headed off towards the door and Clara followed. They exited carefully, again checking for people because they absolutely couldn't get caught with a spaceship there. It was definitely empty, so the Doctor hurried over to the fridge as quickly as she could, seeing that the very same cake from earlier that day. It was modest and white, still in its container with its card affixed. Clara took the card while the Doctor very carefully removed the cake itself, and Clara read the words aloud again.

"' _À ma chérie Clara, qu'ils mangent de la brioche_ ,'" she said.

"How could I not see this? It's the anniversary of her execution today, I said so this morning…"

"This isn't good," said Clara, "She knows who we are! If she knows where we work, she probably knows where we live."

"Unless… it's a coincidence?"

"It can't be a coincidence. It's got her thing on it, 'let them eat cake.'"

"She never actually said that."

"No, because she wrote it on a card and sent it to me," Clara hissed, "Why send me a cake?" The Doctor paused to think about this and seemed to get an idea, carefully removing the plastic top to expose the cake. She lifted it up by its base and pulled out as large a chunk as she could manage. Whatever hunch she had was evidently correct, because it wasn't just a cake at all; there was something inside it. The Doctor continued to pull the cake apart, making quite the mess, until she could draw out an object: an ornate, diamond necklace. She was absolutely stunned by it, lifting it up carefully and pulling off some of the crumbs and bits of icing. "What is it?"

"A diamond necklace," she said, "Well, not _a_ diamond necklace, _the_ diamond necklace, from the scandal that completely ruined Marie Antoinette's reputation with the French public. It was commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress, but she didn't want it, so the royal jewellers tried to sell it to Louis XVI for Antoinette, and they didn't want it either. And then it was stolen as part of an elaborate scheme where some people posed as the Queen to buy it, but historically it's considered that the Queen didn't have anything to do with it herself. It disappeared in 1785, never to be seen again…"

"Is it real?"

"I think so… I guess she _did_ steal it? Or acquired it from the thieves?"

"And then sent it to me?"

"Maybe it's a thank you gift. For bringing her back from the dead." Clara stared at it. The Doctor set it down and took out her sonic screwdriver, getting that covered in bits of cake as well, using it to scan the necklace. Her eyes widened. "It's definitely real… Coo, this necklace is worth hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars. And she sent it _to you_."

"…I suppose I've one-upped you with Madame de Pompadour, then? I raise your Reinette by my Marie Antoinette." The Doctor scowled. "Look, it's not like we can do anything with it. We can't sell it. They'd want to know where we found it. And what would we even do with that money? We don't need it."

"I don't want it in the house or on the ship, I don't trust it," said the Doctor, looking at it suspiciously, "It could have cameras, trackers, microphones in it."

"Well, then we do what any honourable person who's just discovered a missing necklace worth a billion dollars would do. We should anonymously donate it to the Louvre. That's where it should be. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to France, and certainly not to us."

"Potentially the most valuable piece of jewellery in human history, and you want to donate it to a museum?" the Doctor asked her, beginning to smile.

"It's the right thing to do," said Clara.

"I really love you, you know."

"I do know."

"I was so scared you were going to…" she couldn't bring herself to say it. Clara pulled her into a hug.

"I know," she said quietly, "I was scared, too. I'm fine, though. Especially if they destroy the Gloves." The Doctor let her go and smiled slightly, still upset about the prospect of Clara's death.

"Destroying the Gloves, donating the necklace – I do find your integrity _very_ exciting."

Clara laughed, "Well, I'll show you just how much integrity I have once you clean that necklace and make it a bit less cakey. Then we can drop it at the Louvre and go back home as quickly as possible. I am absolutely sick of France."

"You're telling me - and I've got to teach it. How am I supposed to tell a bunch of kids about Marie Antoinette, now I know she's an alien infatuated with my wife?"

"You managed to teach them the Tudors without too much trouble."

"It was actually remarkably difficult trying to keep a straight face while calling her 'the virgin queen,'" she said, picking up the necklace in one hand and the remains of the cake in the other, which she took straight to the bin. It was a good call, Clara didn't trust that the cake was good to eat.

"Y'know, Orpheus's head kept singing after it was cut off," said Clara. "De Born carries his own head around when they meet him in the Inferno."

"Consciousness resides in the head, it's hardly surprising."

"They had different ideas about consciousness and anatomy before the Enlightenment," said Clara, "But it _is_ interesting… I'll look into it more. There might be a clue. You know how folklore can be." The occult was Clara's speciality, after all. "Do you really not have any ideas about what she is? And there's nothing in the TARDIS?"

"No. But I'll find out. Believe me, I will…"

 **AN: Marie Antoinette WILL return as a recurring villain and does have an interesting backstory and origin, and is the focus of the next over-arcing plot (the previous one was X-Boost and Prometheus).**


	33. Trick or Treat - Chapter 1

_Trick or Treat_

 _1_

"I'll tell you what I'm gonna do," the Doctor began, talking as she tried to untangle a clump of fairy lights with green ghosts on them, "I'm gonna make a fake headstone out of cardboard and I'm gonna paint on it, 'Here Lies Clara Oswald's Dignity. 1986-1987.'"

"Why did I lose my dignity in 1987?" Clara asked as she, also, tried to untangle a _different_ ream of fairy lights, this one with orange pumpkins.

"Soon as you said your first word. It was all downhill from there."

"And what was my first word, exactly?" Clara challenged, accidentally pulling off one of the plastic pumpkin-shaped casings from the lights and having to fidget to push it back on.

"Uh…"

"You don't know, do you?"

"Do _you_ know?"

"Yeah, but I won't tell you."

"What? Why not?"

"Because you'll put it on my headstone," Clara said. They were sitting on the living room floor, having pushed the coffee table and many of their book stacks out of the way, surrounded by boxes full of Halloween decorations that were usually stuck under the bed in the spare bedroom. They'd previously occupied the attic until Mattie had moved in, then they'd put them – and the Christmas decorations – out of sight.

"What was it?" the Doctor implored, "Was it something bad? Was it a swear word?"

"No."

"Oh my god."

"What?"

"Was it 'Doctor'?"

" _Was it 'Doctor_ '?" Clara repeated with disbelief, dropping the fairy lights. The Doctor shrugged. "Do people regularly say your name as their first word? And you say _I_ have an ego... No, it was not."

"I think it was River's first word."

"Oh, your ex-wife who was brainwashed into murdering you from the day she was born? That River?" Clara asked sarcastically. The Doctor scowled at her. "Fine, fine. It was 'booby.'"

" _What_!?" she burst out laughing, "No way!"

"It's a very common first word!" Clara protested, "Dad used to tell this bloody anecdote to everybody, I've no idea how you haven't heard it…"

"What's the anecdote?"

"He used to say when I was ten months old my first word was 'booby' and that's how they knew I was queer," she said dryly, still unimpressed by it even though her father had passed quite a while ago now. "Which I don't believe, I don't think they had a clue until I brought a girl home. I'm feminine enough to fly under the radar."

"The gaydar."

"Funny."

"That's great, though. Go Dave. I can't believe he never told me that."

"You know he never liked you. Anyway, it's a common first word. It's where babies get all their food from."

"A behaviour you apparently never grew out of."

"Okay, Freud. I'm not even a lesbian, but fine," she muttered.

"I was right, though."

"About what?"

"About your first word being the same day you lost your dignity. So my headstone is vindicated."

"What was _your_ first word, then?"

"Coo, I can't even remember my name or my birthday, and you think I remember one word I said 1200 years ago? I do not. What did I first say when I regenerated?"

"You asked where you were because you couldn't remember anything."

"Oh. I thought I might've, like, mumbled your name, or something."

"Well, you didn't. What do you want to do with these lights, then? Where are they going?" Clara asked now that she'd untangled her pumpkins.

"Those ones are going above the kitchen doorframe; I don't know about my ghosts. Maybe around the window? Do you think they'll reach?" Clara craned her neck to look behind her.

"I think you'll have to stand on a chair. Unless you want me to float to do it? We'll have to wait for the kids to go home in that case," Clara said.

"We _should_ have put decorations up weeks ago," she grumbled, "I mean, come on, it's the 29th."

"I've been busy, and you said you wanted to do it together. We can leave them up for a bit next month, alright?" Clara said. She felt a little bad about being swamped with work (it was mock exams soon) and putting off decorating, but she did want them to do it together, and it had ultimately worked out.

"Well, you better mark December 1st on the calendar because there's no way I'm putting up our Christmas tree two days before Christmas. We're gonna be decked out until New Year's. I won't stand for anything less. We don't even have any pumpkins yet…"

"Alright, we have three giant, plastic pumpkins right there," Clara pointed out the trio of pumpkins stacked neatly next to the television, "And you haven't put the neon signs up yet." She had neon signs of yet another pumpkin, and yet another ghost. She had never told Clara where she had found these signs, but Clara suspected she had made them herself many years ago when she'd been bored on the TARDIS. They'd already done the garden and the front of the house, that had been the first thing to do while it was still light outside. The exterior was draped in fake cobwebs the Doctor promised were fire retardant, as well as a few ominous tombstones and a pair of skeletons with canes and bowler hats.

"We're still going pumpkin shopping tomorrow, right?" the Doctor asked her for the third time that evening, making sure that Clara hadn't changed her mind.

" _Yes_ , after school, we will go and get pumpkins, then you can carve them and make your pie," Clara told her.

"And then on Friday?"

"You volunteered us to help set up the Halloween disco, so we're just going to be stuck at school until, like, nine o'clock that night," Clara continued to remind her of their schedule, which she was always having to do because the Doctor's memory did not work well when it came to actually _having_ a schedule. She'd been too spontaneous for too long.

"More decorating? I can't wait! But – we're not gonna be here for the trick or treaters."

"Okay, you like Halloween _too much_."

"Clara, it's literally impossible to like Halloween too much."

"When will you regenerate into somebody less American?" Clara jibed, then the Doctor got distracted by something.

"I didn't get to show you my project!" she announced, getting to her feet and almost tripping over the array of cardboard boxes. Clara was immediately suspicious, not sure whether she trusted a project of the Doctor's. She tried to see what the Doctor was doing after she bounded away into the kitchen but couldn't manage it. Nevertheless, after searching a few of the cupboards she returned shortly, holding an object she presented to Clara. It was a very small model shipwreck painted with glow in the dark paint, looking sufficiently eerie.

"That's so cool! You really _did_ make a ghost ship for the fish tank," said Clara, taking the ornament from her, "When did you do this?"

"When you're asleep. It's made of clay. He _might_ break it." Clara thought he probably would break it, quite quickly.

"Well, we'll take a photo of it, and you can always glue it back together, right?" she smiled, giving the ship back to the Doctor.

"As long as he can wait until _after_ Halloween to break it, so he doesn't ruin the atmosphere…" she stepped carefully around the boxes and books to get to the fish tank, where Captain Nemo lurked silently in the gloom. "I care more about aesthetics than I'd ever like to admit." She opened the top of the lobster tank, placing the ghost ship down carefully at the opposite end to where Captain Nemo was so that he didn't snap at her – which he was known to do because he could be aggressive.

"I'd say you put out quite a distinctive aesthetic most of the time, actually," said Clara, "You're wearing a baseball shirt with an alien head on it."

"Joke's on you, Coo, this isn't mine; I stole it from Jenny."

"And yet I've never seen either of you play baseball."

"You don't need to play baseball to wear a baseball shirt – get off my case." They were interrupted by a dull thud upstairs, coming from the loft. "Is it time for them to go home yet?" They had been entertaining Akiko and Stefani for most of the night because they were supposedly all working on a science presentation for Cameron McCloud. But it was now after nine on a Wednesday.

"Yes, it might be," said Clara, "Shall I go see if I can get them to leave?" She'd already committed to driving them both back home since they didn't live close-by.

"I don't like kicking people out."

"I'll kick them out, don't worry," Clara stood up, "See if you can find the neon signs and where to put them."

"I wanna get more neon signs…" she said thoughtfully, looking around at the walls. Clara didn't think there was room for anything else on their walls.

"Well, you think about that. I'll go see what they're up to…"

And what they were up to was certainly _not_ their science project. In the dark, Mattie, Aki and Steph sat in a circle with a large bowl of water in the middle (it was the washing up bowl from the kitchen.) Mattie had also been enlisted in making up one of her fake blood concoctions, which she'd been doing quite a lot recently to prepare for her Halloween costume on Friday – she was going to the disco as a _very_ gruesome zombie. Steph was cutting out letters she'd written on a piece of paper in a marker pen.

"What's the point of this, again?" Mattie asked her.

"To talk to spirits," she said. Aki was clearly quite uncomfortable with the whole idea.

"Like, why?"

"What do you mean? To find out what's on the other side!" Steph said, "It's like, you know, a Ouija board."

"I think Clara has a Ouija board somewhere," said Mattie. There was one in the library, she'd seen it, it had 'Sally Sparrow' written on the back in Tipex because Clara had, presumably, stolen it from Sally at some point. "Why not use that?"

"Because – Ouija boards are fake. But the water bowl game _isn't_ fake."

"Oh, okay," said Mattie sarcastically, not remotely convinced. She rolled her eyes at Aki, but Aki was just eyeing the water very closely like a ghost might appear in it at any second. Mattie just hoped Steph didn't inadvertently agitate the ghost of Marilyn Monroe they kept in a jar in the library, who was very easily agitated. "We are supposed to be doing homework, though."

"Why don't we just, like, summon the ghost of Albert Einstein and ask him what redshift is?"

"Because that's stupid, that's why," said Mattie.

"Look, if you don't want to talk to the ghost and find out your future, you can just leave, the door's right there," Steph pointed at the bedroom door, annoyed.

"We're in my room! In my house!" she protested, "Why would a ghost know the future?"

"Why wouldn't it?"

"That doesn't make sense. What do you want to know about your future?"

"I wanna know if Clara will go out with me one day."

"She definitely won't," said Mattie.

"Maybe Aki wants to know her future."

"I don't know," said Aki, "I'd rather do the science homework. What if you summon a demon?"

"I don't think demons exist, really," said Mattie.

"Um, demons definitely exist, Matilda," said Steph knowingly.

"How do you know? Have you met one?"

"…No, but I have faith. I'm just more imaginative than you, you're boring."

"Do you still believe in Santa, too?" Mattie quipped.

"You can't just _say_ that. What if Aki still believes in Santa?"

"Why would I?" Aki asked.

"Do you have Santa in Japan?"

"A bit. Because of America. They don't get a day off for Christmas, though, like here where it's a huge thing. Do they have Santa in Poland?"

"I was actually born here," Steph pointed out, "But yes, and they still call him Saint Nicholas, and it's everywhere. We're usually in Lodz in December because we go see dad for Chanukah and our _dziadek i babcia_. Don't try and distract me from the demon by asking weird questions about Poland, though."

"Is this water bowl game a Polish thing?" Mattie questioned.

" _No_. It's from the internet. Don't be xenophobic."

"What are-!? I'm not being – urgh. I knew it was a mistake letting you come here to do this homework…" she grumbled, "Which is due on Friday morning, and we've barely started because you've been pissing about with this bowl-"

"Shh, shh," Steph waved a hand at her, "I've finished cutting out my letters."

"Oh, _great_ …" Mattie glanced at her desk where she'd carefully set out all of her science textbooks and laptop in preparation of this presentation they were meant to be doing on cosmic phenomenon, wishing that they could've just done it and got it all over with. Unfortunately, Steph was incredibly persistent and often insufferable.

"What do you do with the letters?" Aki asked. Steph had written the same letter on both sides of the paper so neither side was blank.

"Drop them in there, and then they spell out a word in the order they sink in," she explained.

"Is that it? You don't have to say, like, some magic words, or do a chant, or something?" Mattie asked incredulously.

"Like what? 'Abracadabra'?"

She shrugged, "I don't know, maybe."

"I told you we needed candles, but you said-"

"I said Clara won't let me have candles in my room after a… thing happened, with the blinds over the skylight…" She had accidentally set the blinds over the skylight on fire a month or so ago, and now Clara had rules imposed about naked flames.

"I'll just use my phone," said Steph, turning on the torch on her phone and then putting down on the carpet next to her. It wasn't a very good light source, quite blinding in the gloom. Then she cleared her throat. "Dear spirit-"

"So there _are_ magic words…"

"Shut up! You're gonna _ruin it_ , oh my god," Steph snapped at her. Mattie tried not to laugh as Steph shook her head and began her 'magic words' again, this time with more firmness. " _Dear spirit_. Talk to me, bring me my future, so that I may see." She dropped her pieces of paper into the water.

"Steph, that's the shittest magic spell I've ever heard in my life." Steph hit her on the arm. All three of them leant over to watch the letters as they absorbed enough water that they eventually began to sink, though it took a bit longer than they were expecting. Steph had only written out the English alphabet once, which Mattie thought was a bit of an oversight. "What do you do if the ghost wants to spell a word that uses the same letter twice?" Steph glared at her. The first letter dropped to the bottom of the washing up bowl.

"Look! 'H'!" Steph exclaimed, "H for Hannah!"

"But it can't spell Hannah, because there's only on H, one A, and one N."

"Well, I call her 'Han' sometimes," Steph argued. Remarkably, the 'A' was the next letter to sink, which took Mattie by surprise. After that though, it all fell apart, when they got a 'K', then a 'W', then 'E', then 'Q'."

"So the ghost wants to tell us… 'Hakweq'?"

"Hakweqr," said Aki when the 'R' sank, too. Then they all began dropping a little too quickly to keep track.

"Maybe we should've filmed it and, like, played it back in slow motion, or something?" Mattie suggested.

"It could be an anagram," said Steph.

"For what? 'Wakqah'? 'Qwakeh'? 'Kehwaq'? Are they Polish words?"

"No. Maybe the ghost can't read, or it's some ancient, ghost language," Steph argued, "Could be the ghost of a Victorian child from, like, two-hundred years ago. Maybe somebody died in the chimney."

"This house was built in the 2030s, it doesn't have a chimney," Mattie told her.

"Well maybe there was another house here before where a Victorian child _did_ die, and now it's trying to communicate with us, and you're just making fun of it. You're just being, like, bigoted against dead, Victorian children. Maybe the message is for Aki and it's a Japanese word."

"It's not," said Aki, "It's definitely nonsense."

"I thought you were on my side!? I thought you were a _true believer_."

"I just – I'm not – I don't _disbelieve_ , or believe, I just don't think it's a good idea to do anything that might summon a demon, on the off-chance that demons do exist and-" There was a loud bang against the skylight and they all jumped, turning to look at it. The blind wasn't drawn, and outside they could just see clouds and a glimmer of the moon, but otherwise, it was mainly shadow.

Steph lowered her voice to whisper, " _Maybe that was the demon_?" Mattie frowned. She thought that if anything was going to conjure a demon, it wasn't going to be Steph's weird water bowl game and stupid spell. She didn't know what the bang on the skylight _had_ been, though. A bird flying into it? A rock? It wasn't raining. So she decided to investigate, getting to her feet slowly.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" asked Aki, also lowering her voice.

"It's just a window," said Mattie

"If it's just a window why are you so scared?" Steph challenged.

"I'm not scared," she snapped. She was a bit scared, even though she knew the game was stupid. With the pair of them watching with bated breath, Matilda edged closer and closer to the window, trying to see if there was anything out there in the dark. What if there _was_ a creature? She'd seen all kinds of things that _could_ be considered demonic: she had been to the Unnameable, she'd been kidnapped by aliens, she'd seen a zombie, French aristocrat – maybe it wasn't unthinkable that there would be some sort of monster out there?

Tentatively she reached out to open the window, desperately hoping that she wasn't opening herself up to some sort of attack just because she didn't believe in Stefani's game, when-

"What are you girls up to?" Clara asked loudly, pushing open the door as quickly as possible and scaring them all to death. Steph accidentally knocked the water bowl and some of it splashed onto the floor, which caught Clara's attention. "If you want to do the washing up, you only have to ask."

"We're just doing homework," said Mattie.

"What subject?" asked Clara.

"Just… science."

"Well, make sure you put that back in the kitchen when you're done," Clara said. Mattie didn't think Clara believed her. Clara raised her voice a little like they were deaf, "Are you two about ready to go home, then?"

"What? It's not even late," said Steph, alarmed.

"It's after nine and you both have school tomorrow. And Aki has a curfew."

"But I don't," said Steph, "Can I stay?"

"No," said Mattie. She was sick of Steph's weird games.

"Matts says no," said Clara, "So it's out of my hands."

"Thanks," Steph said to Mattie, not hiding how annoyed she was.

"Come on, then," said Clara, "If you don't shift, I'll stop pretending I believe you about what you're doing with the washing up bowl. Shouldn't open the window at this time of night, moths will get in."

"I don't mind the moths, it's you who hates moths," Matilda said, leaving the window. She felt a bit silly now for thinking there was the slightest possibility that Steph might have summoned a demon.

"I'm not having you fall asleep in class tomorrow again, Steph," Clara warned.

"Where would you have me fall asleep?" Steph immediately retorted.

"Oh my god, she's not gonna go out with you," Mattie said, "Stop."

"She might!" Steph protested.

"I absolutely will not, you're being very inappropriate. Don't make me put you in whole school detention with Mr Chapel again." Steph grimaced. Nobody liked Chapel.

"I'm sixteen now."

"Well done. I'm over ten years older than you and my wife is downstairs." Clara sounded very bored by having to constantly rebuff Steph, who was utterly incapable of taking 'no' for an answer. Mattie hadn't been living with Clara and the Doctor for very long, but Steph's behaviour already reminded her of the way Clara herself couldn't go more than five minutes without flirting with Sally Sparrow when she was around.

As Steph and Aki finally made to put their shoes on, which had been unceremoniously dumped on the stairs just outside the door, the Doctor started yelling quite loudly from the living room, startling Clara most of all.

"CLARA!" she shouted.

"What's up?" Clara called back, perhaps not loudly enough for the Doctor to hear her all the way on the ground floor.

" _CLARA!_ " she shouted even louder. Clara rolled her eyes and turned to leave the kids, who were just as confused as she was, to see what the Doctor wanted. She jumped the last few stairs to get to the first-floor landing and then leant over the bannister, the Doctor at the foot of the stairs below.

"Why are you shouting? Are you okay?"

"The lobster's got out," she said, "I don't know where he is." That was _not_ good.

"What's going on?" Matilda then called down from the top floor where she, Aki and Steph all waited.

"The lobster's escaped," Clara replied, "You three stay upstairs, he won't hesitate about snapping anybody's toes off. And I mean that," she added in a sharper tone of voice. Hopefully, they did what she told them. It was lucky Captain Nemo would struggle to get up the stairs, if he could manage it at all. Leaving the kids, she rejoined her wife in the living room, the lid of the tank slightly ajar. "We should rename him Houdini. This is the third time this has happened."

"Sorry," the Doctor apologised sheepishly, "I must've forgotten to close the lid properly."

"It's fine. He can't have got far, and he'll be alright out of the water for a bit," said Clara. The other two times he had escaped had also been because the Doctor had forgotten to secure the lid properly, but Clara wasn't going to bring her wife's memory into question. She was already so sensitive about it. Besides, Clara wasn't particularly fond of Captain Nemo, mostly because he had snapped off one of her fingers with his claws before and waiting for it to grow back had been quite an ordeal. She couldn't say she'd shed a tear if the lobster wound up dead. "Is the back door closed?" The Doctor paused to think about this, but evidently did not know and so she turned on her heel to go check. Clara put her hands on her hips and peered about the living room for a sign of him, but suspected he'd found his way under the furniture. The main problem was that the room was full of boxes of Halloween decorations, so getting underneath the furniture was a lot trickier for them than for a crustacean.

"Door's closed," the Doctor returned, "Did you see him?"

"No… he's quite sneaky to say he's bright blue."

"This wouldn't happen if we had a dog."

"Says the person who literally stole the lobster from a restaurant," said Clara, "I'd be happier with no pets at all. We're not getting a dog."

"My other wives would've let me get a dog."

"Maybe you should've stayed married to one of them, then," Clara quipped.

"Mm, well. They're not as cute as you, so… where do you think he is?"

"Under the chairs or the sofa, probably," said Clara, "The little pest…" Maybe she _would_ rather have a dog.

"I should go get my gloves," the Doctor decided, meaning the chainmail gloves she used to clean the lobster tank and put Captain Nemo into the bucket he occupied during the process. Unlike Clara's, the Doctor's fingers wouldn't just grow back. Well, not unless she regenerated they wouldn't, and one missing finger wasn't worth the cost of a whole regeneration. Yet again, she vanished into the kitchen, as Clara glimpsed a bright, moving shape near the armchair Rose usually occupied. It was him alright – there was no mistaking the blue.

She dove for the creature as it scurried under the TV stand. When it didn't emerge from the other side, Clara resolved he must be lurking and biding his time until he could make another escape attempt. Unluckily for Captain Nemo, with the teenagers upstairs and out of sight, Clara was free to use her telekinesis. Getting as close to the carpet as she could (which, upon doing so, she realised smelled a bit funny and needed a deeper clean), Clara peered into the shadows. A ripper claw came straight for her face and cut across her nose.

"Fuck! That's it, you little shit…" she muttered, grabbing the lobster telekinetically and dragging him out from beneath the television set. As soon as she had the chance she seized him around the middle and lifted him up. He was heavy and wet, and in her grip flailed and snapped his claws viscously. She felt blood oozing from the fresh cut across her nose, holding the lobster at arm's length and grimacing. "Doctor!" she shouted.

"Can't find my gloves, just a sec!" the Doctor called back.

"Get in here!"

The doorbell rang.

"Shit…" Clara cursed again. Her wife was not in sight, and whoever was visiting them evidently couldn't wait for a minute because they started banging on the door as well. Was she _really_ going to have to answer the front door with an angry lobster in her hand? Captain Nemo continued to writhe and when the Doctor didn't reappear, Clara resolved that yes, she was going to have to do that.

Holding the lobster as best she could in the one hand she went into the hall, the keys left in the lock by her forgetful wife, presumably. The doorbell rang again.

"Hold on," she called, fumbling with the keys in the lock. Captain Nemo tried to twist around and get at her arm with his crusher claw, still not calming down. Finally, she was able to open the door and came face to face with one of their neighbours. "Derek, hi!" It was Derek Beckett, Hannah Beckett's father and long-time enemy of Stefani. Derek recoiled at the sight of Clara brandishing a sea creature at him, however.

"What _is_ that!?" he was horrified.

"Just a lobster," said Clara, "Sorry about this, he's got out – _Doctor_!" she shouted again. The Doctor showed up, both of her hands now covered in chainmail, to relieve Clara of the lobster.

"There, there, baby," said the Doctor to Captain Nemo, "Did you want to go exploring again, huh? Did you?" She cooed at it like it was an infant, taking it out of Clara's hands. Of course he stopped writhing so much when Clara wasn't holding him anymore; she knew he had it in for her, the bastard. She wiped some of the blood away from the bridge of her nose.

"…Sorry, again," said Clara. Derek stared at her. "Is there something I can do for you…?" Somewhat rudely, he craned his neck to get a look over the top of her head to see what the Doctor was doing in the living room, carefully placing Captain Nemo back into his tank and sprinkling the water with a few bits of dried blood worm to keep him placated. Clara cleared her throat. "Derek?"

"Is that your dinner?" he asked.

"No, it's a pet," said Clara, then raised her voice to add, "But if he gets out again, I am going to eat him, mark my words."

"You will do no such thing!" the Doctor shouted back, "It's not his fault; he's misunderstood."

"He doesn't even have a brain, sweetheart."

"Don't you be so rude to our son."

"Oh my god…" Clara shook her head, "Right, Derek, did you need something?" They had never received a house call from Hannah's parents before. She wouldn't have recognised him at all if it wasn't for parent's evenings.

"I wanted a word with you," he said pompously, standing up straight, "In private."

"Oh, uh… okay?"

"It's about that Polish girl."

Clara was alarmed, "We should talk outside, then, probably." She would not put it past Steph to be eavesdropping from the landing above, quiet and out of sight. Clara indicated for Derek to take a few steps backwards into the drive and she closed the door behind her. The Doctor was still talking to the lobster. It was chillier than she thought.

"You have a lot of decorations," Derek commented, indicating the skeletons in their front garden and the cobwebs draped beneath the windows.

"Well, my better half is a big fan of Halloween," Clara shrugged, "Far be it from me to spoil her theatrics. God only knows what she's going to do for Christmas."

"It's quite juvenile."

"It's just a bit of fun," Clara grew a little defensive. "You said you wanted to talk to me about Stefani?"

"Yes. I hear you have her ear."

"From who?"

"From Hannah, she says the girl listens to you."

"Oh, right. She's in my form, I suppose?" Clara wasn't sure that Steph listened to her at all. "Well?"

"I want you to talk to her."

"Okay? About anything specific…?"

"I want you to tell her to keep away from my daughter."

"Um… you know Steph isn't… she's just friends with our Matilda. I don't have any sway or authority with her when it's not something to do with putting her phone away or handing in her homework in time."

"What's your point?" he asked coldly.

"That I'd be overstepping my role as a teacher if I were to try and tell one of my students who she can and can't spend her time with," Clara said, growing more serious with every sentence.

"No."

"…'No'?"

"Hannah's grades are slipping. It's the girl's fault."

"Hannah's grades are fine," said Clara. Like Steph, Hannah was in her form as well, so she knew how she was performing in school. "She's on track to meet all her targets."

"She needs to exceed her targets. She can't have distractions. The girl is a manipulator, Hannah needs to focus and she won't let her."

"…Steph's not stupid, you know. She can speak five languages. And if they like each other-"

He scoffed at her, "I should have known you wouldn't listen."

"Excuse me?"

"You tell that girl to stay away from my daughter, or I'll have to bring this up with the school. Let them know you aren't carrying out your duty of care properly."

"Sorry, you're threatening me because you don't like your daughter's girlfriend?" Clara was stunned. What year was it, for him to have this bizarre attitude?

"I don't much care for your lack of professionalism, Mrs Oswald," he turned to leave, practically mid-conversation. "I'm a lawyer, you know. Don't think I won't see about having you removed from your position if you're not capable of doing your job properly."

"I – but – that's-" He was already walking away down the street, back to his own house down the road, leaving Clara offended and aghast in the driveway of her home. He didn't even look back over his shoulder. Clara tutted and shook her head, muttering to herself, "The nerve…" Once she was sure he'd left she went back inside, finding the Doctor waiting in the living room door. Captain Nemo was safely back in his tank, all sealed up so he couldn't escape again.

"What did he want?" the Doctor asked.

"Just…" but Clara spotted Aki, Steph and Mattie lurking at the top of the stairs. "Nothing important. I'll tell you when I get back. Come on, you two – into the van. Aki's by the door, we're going to North Laine first."

Finally, she managed to herd the two girls into the camper, Steph more than a little happy about being able to sit next to Clara, so that she could drop them each back home as promised. As they left, the Doctor bade Mattie come downstairs and help her hang up more of her fairy lights; Clara expected most of the decorations to be up by the time she returned.

"Did you girls get much of your science project done, then?" Clara asked as she drove through Brighton, the roads not too busy at that time of night. They were mostly repaired after the incident with the trees, though lots of gardens and areas of common ground were still overrun with bits of dead plant. She was heading for the seafront.

"…It's not due until Friday," said Aki. That meant no, they hadn't gotten much of it done.

"Why don't _you_ make people do presentations?" Steph asked.

"If you want to do a presentation…" Clara began wryly.

"N-no, I just mean… you assign tons of homework, but not that."

"I don't think they help to retain an awful lot of information. People focus too much on their own and not enough on other people's. Besides, _I'm_ the teacher."

"Aren't they good for building up confidence?" Steph asked.

"I think _you've_ got a bit too much confidence," said Clara. "At GCSE level… they cause a lot of additional stress. Nobody likes speaking in front of a bunch of judgemental teenagers."

"Then why do you do it?" Steph challenged.

"I get paid. A lot of people can't hack it, though. You lot are merciless."

"I heard Miss Pickman constantly makes people in her class do presentations."

"She does," said Aki, "It's awful."

"Presentation in a language you barely know – I can hardly imagine," Clara mused.

"Can you speak any languages?" Steph asked.

"I'm speaking one right now."

Steph scowled, "Apart from English."

"…Not really," Clara admitted, "I did a bit of Old Norse, at university. Not that that's remotely useful, but… the Doctor, though, she knows a lot. She can translate for me."

"What if she dumps you? Then you won't have a translator."

"I'll just have to get Miss Pickman to teach me some French, then." In truth though, Clara was sick and tired of France and everything to do with it.

"I'll teach you to speak Polish."

"Alright, if I ever split up with my wife – which won't happen, for the record – then I'll let you tell me some Polish. Are you happy now?"

"How can you _know_ you'll never split up?" Steph persisted.

"I don't, but I trust and I hope, and that's all anyone can do."

"How did you meet?"

"You can't ask that," Aki interrupted to tell Steph off, "It's none of your business."

"It's just a _question_."

"It's not a very interesting story," Clara lied. It _would_ be interesting could she tell it in its entirety, but for the sake of discretion, she had to cut out a lot of details. "I called a computer helpline and the Doctor was the one who answered the phone. They, uh… had to help with a problem with the wifi, and we went out for coffee."

"Oh," said Steph, "You're right, it's not very interesting."

She laughed, "I can always make one up? See, what actually happened is there was an alien invasion, and the Doctor had to save me from having my brain downloaded onto an evil computer system."

"Yeah, okay," said Steph, not paying as much attention now and slouching in the middle seat. Clara was amused as she tried to remember the best route to North Laine. While she turned her focus on driving, Aki once again began to needle Stefani about how much of their science homework they had left to do.

"Which shop is yours, Aki?" Clara asked a short while later as she drove slowly down the seafront, past the vibrant facades of the beachside businesses.

"It's that one, Inoue Noodle Bar," Aki pointed out a shop with a neon sign above it, but the neon was a handful of kanji characters. It had the name in English in a larger but non-neon sign below. The sign wasn't switched on at that time, however.

"Do you only sell noodles in there, then?" Clara inquired. She'd never seen Aki's family business.

"No, dad does a lot of different things."

"Do you do takoyaki? I _love_ takoyaki, I get it every time we go to Japan. There's this one tiny food stand near Shinjuku Station that's kind of, nestled out of the way… hard to find, but it's great," Clara said.

"You've been to Tokyo?"

"Yeah, a few times," she said, "And other places. We've been to Okinawa and Hokkaido, too. Where are you from?"

"Kobe."

"I think I might have been to Kobe… honestly, I lose track." Clara pulled over in front of the noodle place in a spot with double yellow lines, but she wasn't sticking around for long enough to get a ticket. "I might have to drag the Doctor here one evening one of these days… she loves noodles, she likes… what are those thick ones called?"

"Udon noodles," said Aki.

"Yes, those! We'll swing by. Tell your dad it was nice to have you and you're welcome any time," Clara smiled as she got out of the car.

"Thanks, Mrs Oswald." Clara smiled as Aki closed the door. Clara – and Steph, to a lesser degree – waved as she left, waiting to make sure Aki was let into the shop before driving off. She saw Aki's father Hideo through the glass, and he waved and smiled at her as well. They absolutely needed to visit for date night soon.

"Shift over, then," Clara told Steph. Begrudgingly, Steph did as she was told, moving closer to the door and then slouching down. Clara put the van back into gear and began to pull out. "That's weird," Clara indicated to Steph a shop a few doors down that still had the lights on, Carter's Confectionary, a sweetshop. "Are they still open?"

"No," said Steph, "They're probably just eating, like, leftover sweets."

"Hm… I keep meaning to go there to get things for trick or treaters this week…"

"Will you get any trick or treaters? Aren't you going to the disco?"

"Yeah, but still… anyway." She put the sweetshop out of her mind as she drove away, taking the van towards Hanover. For a while there was silence as she tried to work out how to broach the topic of Derek Beckett with Steph (and as she mused on whether she should turn around and get some sweets as a nice surprise for her wife.) "So," she eventually began, "Hannah's dad stopped by to talk to me."

"I know. I heard him come to the door." Steph was looking out of the window.

"…He's a bit of a piece of work, isn't he?" said Clara.

"He's a dick. What did he want?"

"To talk to me about you. He told me to tell you to stay away from Hannah. I wouldn't normally mention it, but I feel like you should know what he's doing. I don't know whether I should tell Hannah."

"She probably knows," Steph muttered, "He never listens to her. She stands up to him, she argues with him, but he just… I don't know, nothing gets through. He's like, obsessed with her becoming a lawyer or a doctor or some sort of professional. Han won't let her grades slip, she's terrified of him."

"Mm. I see now why you're never allowed to stay over there."

"Did your parents let you just have people over at night?" Steph asked.

"They didn't care what I was doing as long as I wasn't getting pregnant," she joked, but it was sort of true. Her father had always preferred the girls she saw to the boys. "They probably would've supported me if I _did_ get pregnant, too."

"Are they dead?"

"What?" Clara was taken aback, and Steph quickly tried to cover for herself.

"I don't – it's just, you're talking about them in the past tense."

"Oh… Yeah. They are."

"Sorry for asking," she mumbled.

"No, it's alright…" It had been a while, after all.

"Are you gonna warn me away from Hannah, then?"

"I think you and Hannah are both old enough to spend time with whoever you want, so no. I'm not letting her father bully me into bossing teenagers around. Just try not to get Hannah pregnant."

"I'll do my best," said Steph sarcastically.

"Tell you what, though – my dad never liked the Doctor."

"I thought everybody likes the Doctor?"

Clara laughed a little, "They do. Except for my dad." She didn't add that the reason her dad had never liked the Doctor was that they'd eloped in Las Vegas (in the future) after only knowing each other for a handful of months.

"You think I should get Hannah to marry me, then?"

"God, no. You're only fifteen."

"I'm sixteen, I had a birthday, last week. I'm legal now." Clara shook her head.

"Maybe stop with that if you want me to continue trying to defend you to Mr Beckett."

"You defended me?" Steph was surprised.

"As best as I could," said Clara. She felt like she was lying and perhaps she should have told Hannah's father what she thought of him and his coming to her house and threatening her, but didn't want to get called into Moore's office to explain the situation.

"What did you say?"

"Not a lot, he didn't stick around. I reminded him that you can speak five languages, though," Clara said.

"You mean you… said something nice? About me?"

"I, erm… well, yeah, I mean, I told the truth. Do people not say nice things about you usually?" Clara asked. Didn't her parents ever tell her they were proud of her for her proficiency for languages? Her good grades?

"I don't know. Jake's okay."

"…Which building is yours again?" Clara had to change the subject as she turned onto the street in Hanover where Steph lived. She didn't look too thrilled about going home, though.

"Can't I stay over, in Mattie's room? We could do the science work."

"No, and you should have done that already," said Clara, "You can't stay on a school night." They'd hidden enough of their tell-tale alien artefacts in their bedroom and the library that they could now have guests without worrying about them discovering the truth about their lives, but she still had to fulfil _some_ parental duties, which included not letting Mattie have friends to stay on weeknights.

"You can just drop me off here, on the corner."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"I'm not leaving until I know you're home safe."

"Well, ugh, fine. It's that block," she indicated a block of drab, grey flats. Clara parked the van on the curb.

"If you get Mattie in trouble because you're distracting everyone from the homework, you'll have me to answer to as well as Mr McCloud, alright?"

"And what does answering to you involve, exactly?" Steph asked.

"Unbelievable… right, go on, get out, go home," Clara said, indicating the door, "I'll see you tomorrow in class, and I better not hear anything bad about your presentation. You don't want to be banned from hanging around with Mattie as well as Hannah, do you?"

"You'd do that?"

"No, but I think Matilda might if you don't get on with it," Clara again indicated the door and Steph sighed and finally opened it to get out. True to her word, Clara didn't leave until she saw Steph go into the block, and then stuck around for another minute or so for good measure as she fidgeted with the CD player. Everyone from that decade who had ever seen the inside of the van had been alarmed at the presence of not only the CD slots but also the tape deck and the analogue radio. The Doctor kept a record player in the back, too. But for the short drive back to Fiveways, the Doctor wasn't there to complain about the music choice, so Clara was free to hum along to The Strokes as much as she liked.

She was mostly occupied by that, and by driving, so the journey home drifted by in no time at all. Before long she was reversing into the driveway – which was no mean feat in such a ridiculous van – and climbing out, looking forward to having a shower and going to bed for the night. When did she get so old?

Clara locked the van and went back into the house to find the Doctor alone in the living room, fairy-lights now strung up, holding her neon pumpkin and examining it with the sonic screwdriver.

"Everything alright?" she asked

"I think it's broken," said the Doctor, "That's a shame."

"Oh well. We've still got the chocolate pumpkin in the fridge, for Friday," Clara reminded her. The chocolate pumpkin was orange-flavoured, which was a little confusing, but Clara was very much looking forward to eating it when they were finally done with the disco. There had been a few of them for sale in a chocolatier near the seafront the previous weekend, and the Doctor couldn't bear _not_ getting one. "Where's Matts?"

"Gone to bed, all tuckered out from socialising with people."

"Mm, I know the feeling," said Clara, sitting down in the chair by the window to take off her shoes. The Doctor watched her for a second, then set down the broken ornament and approached to talk to her.

"What did he want, then? Hannah's dad?"

"Oh, god… the nerve of him, I can hardly believe…" Clara muttered, "He told me to convince Steph to dump Hannah because he's worried about Hannah's grades falling."

"He _what_?"

"And that's not the worst part. He said if I _don't_ do this, he's going to go over my head to talk to Lorna and tell her I'm unprofessional and don't care about the academic success of my students. Started going on about how he's a fancy lawyer or something." The Doctor gawked.

"That-! I can't believe he threatened you! Eurgh, I _hate_ people like that!"

"I know," she sighed.

"Well – did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"What he asked."

"Of course not. I did the opposite and told Steph what he's up to. Not the part about him threatening to get me fired, but about him trying to manipulate Hannah," Clara explained, "What do you think I should do? Do you think I should tell Hannah?"

"I don't know…" said the Doctor.

"Do you think I should warn Lorna that he might pull a stunt like this?"

"Ask Ida," said the Doctor, "She'll know whether Lorna is in the mood to deal with something like that. Though, I think she _would_ appreciate the heads-up. Or talk to Lucia, she's the head of year; he'll probably go to her first if he goes to anyone. Unless he's all hot air."

"Yeah… I'll see what Lucia says about it all…"

"Worse comes to worst, we'll send Jenny to break his kneecaps," she joked. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. I've been threatened by scarier people than Derek Beckett, after all. Just two weeks ago, Robespierre tried to shoot me. Not to mention Will Smiles and his serum. And you when you thought I ate that leftover chicken you were saving."

"I was very distraught about that, and I have apologised," she said. She'd forgotten which shelf in the fridge she'd left it on. Clara leant back in the chair and sighed again, slouching down. "Are you tired?"

"Quite tired."

"Like, how much? Out of ten?"

"I don't know – six? Seven?"

"But not _super_ tired?"

"…What do you want?" Clara asked, though she knew the answer.

"Nothing," she said innocently, "I was just thinking about how, y'know, it's only just gone ten o'clock, and we don't have any work to do, and you're a little upset… there might be something we could do to cheer you up."

"You're total filth, you know."

"We've got that in common. How 'bout it?" the Doctor took her hand and tugged gently on her arm.

"You're not putting a lot of effort into seducing me."

"When has seducing you taken effort? I usually just have to smile, or say 'hi.' Or stand next to you." Clara continued to think, then yawned and got to her feet, still holding the Doctor's hand.

"Okay, you've got me. I'm going to get some water and then I'll see you upstairs in a minute."

She beamed, "It's a date."


	34. Trick or Treat - Chapter 2

_Trick or Treat_

 _2_

Detective Sergeant Benji Speyer pulled into a space in front of a sweetshop in North Laine, Carter's Confectionary, down near the beaches. It was the very crack of dawn on October 30th, and he'd been called out at the tail end of an unpleasant night shift because there was a suspected homicide. If only they'd waited a bit longer until it had been called in he would have been able to go home and get his daughter ready for school, but he wasn't sure he'd make it back in time now. The car windscreen was soaking wet in a rainstorm that had picked up in the last few hours of the night, the bleak, grey sky rumbling with the remnants of thunder clouds. Speyer put on the handbrake and got out of the car, hunching his shoulders against the rain. He'd forgotten his umbrella again.

Two uniformed officers waited outside the shop, their vivid police car parked behind his; he approached the one on the left, PC Presley, and asked for any details about the scene that might have been left out of his dispatch.

"Victim's name is Dennis Carter," she explained, "We talked to the neighbours, they say they heard some noise late last night and saw the lights were on but didn't think anything of it."

"Really?"

"Apparently he often stays at work late and there's a lot of machinery on site. They make their own sweets in the back. Suppose they just thought he was going above and beyond."

"Any other witnesses?"

"Not yet."

"Did you get a time of death from Victor?" She shook her head. He glanced around at the street until spotting a CCTV camera attached to a lamppost across the street. "Is that a dummy camera?"

"Don't think so," answered the other PC, Wilson. "But it's not pointing at the shop."

"Once Victor gets a time of death, get the footage from that camera."

"But it's-"

"It's pointed at the street, that means if anyone drove past, they might be a fresh witness," he explained. Wilson was newly qualified and hadn't yet developed his abilities for deductive reasoning – unless he was better than Speyer thought, and the night shift was getting to him as well. "Just see if anyone drove past. They might have seen the murderer go in and out."

"Yes, sir." Speyer entered the shop, pretending he didn't hear Wilson make an unpleasant remark about him to Presley when they thought he couldn't hear them. He couldn't see anything of note in the front. Nothing broken, no sign of forced entry on the door, nothing out of the ordinary. He cut through into the back where Victor, the coroner, and a pair of CSIs were looking around with torches. The dead body of Dennis Carter was splayed out on the floor in the back room of his shop, between the large machines used to make hard-boiled sweets. Speyer made a habit of getting his daughter some of those sweets on her birthday, but it looked like he wouldn't be able to do that anymore.

He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans to remove the temptation to touch anything, "What can you tell me?"

"It's a weird one," said Victor, who'd been crouching next to the body. He stood up when Speyer came to talk to him, "He's been choked to death with icing sugar, cake icing."

"They don't sell cakes here," said Speyer, peering down at the body. His skin had gone a purplish colour and his mouth was overflowing with a gluttonous, pink substance; the icing.

"No, and we haven't been able to find any icing in this stock room. The murderer must have brought it with them."

"Definitely murder? Not a strange kind of suicide?"

"If it was, it must have been his ghost who disposed of the weapon," said Victor, "He's got marks on his wrists from being tied up with rope, but no rope, either."

"Any fingerprints?"

"A lot, but they're all the victim's or other members of staff we have on record," answered one of the CSIs, holding up a remote fingerprint scanner they used to identify prints on the fly at crime scenes. Speyer would have to interview them all to find a possible motive for killing their boss.

"It's not just murder," said Victor, "It's sadistic if you ask me. His oesophagus, lungs and mouth are packed _full_ of icing. They kept going with this stuff long after he was dead."

"Someone must have quite the vendetta."

"Maybe it's one of your lot," said the second CSI, Donovan.

"Excuse me?"

"That's what they say in the mob, isn't it? 'Iced'? This bloke's _definitely_ been iced." Speyer clenched his jaw, annoyed. Would they ever let that go? He was estranged with his entire immediate family, didn't have a thing to do with their business. _He_ didn't even have a criminal record.

"Maybe if they're in the 1940s, they do," he muttered, "This won't be a mob hit."

"Wouldn't hurt to call around," quipped Donovan.

"Say that again," Speyer challenged him. Donovan was silent. "That's what I thought." Even if he did think it was the mob, and even if he wanted to ask them, he didn't have a way to contact a single one of his relatives and hadn't for nearly fifteen years. He'd cut them off when Katie had been born.

"Could be a rival cake shop?" suggested Victor, "Do they fight much for clientele, cakes and sweets?"

"I doubt it, they don't sell cakes and Carter doesn't sell sweets. Is there a way to tell what brand this is?"

"Only if it's a shop-bought mix, it'd probably be impossible if somebody made it from scratch, which isn't exactly hard. I'll do my best, but I wouldn't expect much. It's a very interesting murder weapon, I'll give them that," explained Victor; Speyer knew a lot of that already, Katie liked to bake with him – when he had the time. So an actual murder weapon was going to be quite hard to find. Speyer squinted around, wondering if maybe an incriminating bag of icing had been kicked underneath one of the machines.

"Why aren't the lights on?"

"The switch is behind that thing, and nobody wants to go near it," Victor pointed at a shadowy corner behind Speyer, who turned to see what he was talking about. He almost jumped out of his skin when he saw it; it was some kind of elaborate costume. A six-foot-tall monster loomed in the darkness, and he had to guess that it was an animatronic that Carter had used, or had been thinking of using, for advertising. It looked to be modelled from various sweets; a bloated belly like an enormous piece of liquorice, a shining chest like a hard-boiled sweet, two huge, floppy feet made of marshmallows, and a head like one of the blue Liquorice Allsorts.

"This thing looks like Bertie Bassett," said Speyer, "Do they sell much liquorice here?"

"I think they make it on-site," said Victor.

"It must be a robot or something," he said, "A weird mascot." It unnerved him a great deal to be around, and he, too, found himself deciding that he'd rather not reach for the light switch, content to look around the room with torches. But then he spotted something else, something that probably wouldn't have gone amiss if the lights were on. "Hang on…" he took his torch out of his jacket pocket and switched it on, illuminating a series of marks on the wall.

But they weren't just marks, they were letters, spelling out a word written enormously across the whole back wall of the sweetshop backroom in the same white icing bursting from Dennis Carter's mouth. Written up there for all to see in bold, capital letters, was one, lonely word: 'DOCTOR'.

* * *

Rain lashed the windows of the library at Turing High School, cacophonous enough that it was preventing them from getting their science homework done over lunch. Food and stationary stretched across the table – they didn't have an awful lot of time to spare before the afternoon lessons – but lo and behold, Steph was still finding ways to be a nightmare. Only now she wasn't _only_ disrupting what Matilda and Aki were trying to do, but she was also sneaking away to a nearby table every so often to bother Hannah Beckett and _her_ friends, the four of whom were also trying to do their science presentation for Mr McCloud, which was due to see the light of day tomorrow. Steph was a harder obstacle to overcome than the persistent thunder outside.

"No, look, seriously," Steph began on the same topic of conversation she'd been harping on about all day, "I think I'm being haunted. I think there's a demon after me. I mean, look at the weather."

"Steph, we're in England," said Mattie, "It rains. It's not because you tried to summon a demon with some pieces of paper and my washing up bowl."

"You literally can't prove that."

"Do you actually even believe in demons? If there's no hell in Judaism, how can there be demons?"

"They're forces put into the world by God for his own ends," she said, "And besides, there's evidence, like the rain."

"I'm not talking about this anymore. I'm reading about black holes, go away. Go tell Hannah about your demons."

"Fine," Steph snapped, getting up and ditching them for Hannah once again. Mattie rolled her eyes. Hannah's friends were just as annoyed as Mattie and Aki were at the interruptions, but Mattie tried to put it out of her mind and focused on a passage in a very old textbook about the visible light spectrum. Aki was also taking notes but cursed suddenly, stopping through to get something out of her bag. It was a packet of tablets. The box was pink, the foil was pink, and when she popped out one of the pills that, too, was bright pink.

"What are those?" Mattie asked.

"Oestrogen tablets."

"Why are they so pink?"

"They're for feminising hormone therapy."

"Yeah, but… they're _so_ pink," said Mattie, staring.

"I forgot to take it this morning," Aki explained, "It's just nice that they're pink, I guess."

"Isn't it kind of patronising? Are the testosterone ones blue?"

"I don't know, I've never seen them. I don't know any trans boys to ask."

"Are there none in our year? You've been here longer than me."

"There isn't like, a group chat, or a big club, where all the LGBT people hang out with each other."

"Are you sure?" Mattie asked, glimpsing Steph pull Hannah out of her seat by the elbow, "Looks like Steph and Hannah might be making one right now over in those bookshelves."

"Urgh… that's just… think of the books…" said Aki.

"Maybe we can get this finished before she comes back, if we hurry." But as the two queer girls who had been in the room disappeared into the stacks together, they were quickly replaced by two more – the only difference was that these ones were grown adults.

Mattie was a little bit mortified when Clara and the Doctor came into the library together, carrying their packed lunches between them. She, too, had a packed lunch in front of her made by the Doctor that morning, because when the Doctor made lunch for Clara – which happened on days when the weather was bad enough to stop them going out to a café – she now made one for Matilda, as well. Though, she refused to make Nutella sandwiches, because they weren't 'nutritional', or something (it had been a BLT that day.)

"Are we allowed to sit with you, or is that not okay?" Clara asked. She was embarrassing her already.

"We're trying to avoid the staffroom. There are… arguments," said the Doctor cryptically.

"Between who? About what?"

"Just…"

"Miss Pickman and Mr Chapel aren't very happy with each other," said Clara, "And that's all we have to say on the matter, but they're being very annoying… promise we won't disturb you while you do your science homework."

"Ooh, are you reading about redshift?" the Doctor spotted what was on the page of the textbook Aki was reading, pulling out the empty chair on her left to sit down, "Redshift is right at the top of my list of favourite astronomical phenomena. Is this what your presentation is on?"

"…Yeah, but it's sort of confusing," said Aki.

"It's easy once you get the hang of it – it's just about understanding wavelength patterns," the Doctor explained, "Should've said something about your topic, I could've helped."

"Don't do it for them," said Clara, sitting down and taking out her sandwich. Mattie wasn't too thrilled about that, because Clara almost exclusively ate egg sandwiches, and even if they didn't have eggs themselves, they were always _full_ of mayonnaise, more mayonnaise than any human should be consuming in one sitting. This meant that it _stank_ to be in the same room.

"See, it's because the cones in human eyes are designed to receive different wavelengths because wavelength correlates to colour. Red has the longest wavelength, so as objects in outer space move further away, the wavelength gets longer, and they look redder and redder. I thought your project is about black holes?"

"Um… it is, but… aren't you a history teacher?"

"I do a bit of everything."

"Do you know what a singularity is?"

" _Do I_? Don't jump into a singularity for at least an hour after eating, that's what I always say." She paused. "Or is that swimming?" Clara kicked her underneath the table. "I mean, yes, I do know; it's the point of infinite density in the heart of a black hole…"

Clara zoned out as the Doctor began this next explanation. She'd listened to her explain cosmic phenomenon every day for decades and wasn't interested in hearing it at the moment. It didn't take long for the Doctor to get onto quasars and all sorts of nonsense Clara couldn't care less about. Aki was hastily scribbling notes to keep up with what the Doctor was telling her.

But soon enough Clara was being called upon for information, summoned by Alice, Hannah's closest friend who absolutely _hated_ Stefani. And come to think of it, she didn't see either Steph _or_ Hannah, though she saw their bags and empty chairs. Regardless, she took her sandwich to the next table over, leaving the Doctor to talk endlessly about the physics she wished she was teaching, and pulled out a chair with a different set of girls.

"What's up?" she asked.

"I don't understand this play," said Alice, holding a book out to her, "They're all acting like it's a happy ending, but Demetrius never wanted to be with Helena, and he's still being tricked by the magic flower."

"Oh. Yeah, it is a bit… dodge," said Clara.

"But that's the end."

"Yeah, well, it was a few hundred years ago. And Demetrius is a bit of a prick, really, isn't he? Why won't he just leave Lysander and Hermia alone at the beginning?" said Clara, "He's sleazy. Besides, Shakespeare predicted this sort of reaction, see." She put down her sandwich and took the play from Alice, flipping to the very last page and pointing out a passage, "Do you see, Puck's closing soliloquy to the audience: ' _If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended; That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream_.'"

"So it _is_ a dream? Are the fairies not real?"

"It's all up for interpretation," said Clara, "But you have to imagine being there, watching it, and having Puck come out and say all this. Shakespeare is talking through Puck; it's authorial intervention to say, 'hey, don't be offended because this is all made up.'"

"But it's still creepy," Alice persisted.

"You're at perfect liberty to think it's creepy, why don't you write your coursework on consent in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ , or something? It's totally fine to think that Shakespeare is a massive scumbag, you just have to have some textual evidence and reasoning to back yourself up."

"What do _you_ think about Shakespeare?"

"Bit of a cad. Wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him."

"So you don't like this play?"

"Oh, it's one of my favourites. Not that you're wrong about it – you're completely right about Demetrius still being under the effects of Love in Idleness by the end. The existence of Love in Idleness as the core plot device brings quite a lot into question where consent is concerned."

"Hannah wanted to ask you something about Lysander," said Alice.

"Oh… okay? Where is she?" Clara glanced around.

"She's off with Steph, in the bookshelves somewhere."

"In the-? Did you hear that?" she leant back in her seat to get the Doctor's attention. The Doctor was mid-sentence but broke off immediately when Clara spoke to her.

"Hear what?"

"Steph and Hannah have snuck off into the shelves."

"Yeah, they went just before you came in," said Mattie, "Gives us a chance to get this work done…"

"…Do we need to do something about that?" asked the Doctor, "Like, stop them? This is a school. Wouldn't it be like… exhibitionism?"

"Stop talking," said Clara.

There was a crash and a shriek from among the shelves. A whole row of books came falling to the floor as if pushed, and it didn't take long for Steph and Hannah to reappear, having been attacked by the furniture. They hadn't been able to get into _too_ much trouble by the looks of things, but Steph was especially traumatised about something or other and came to bother Matilda as soon as possible.

"You see!?" she hissed, " _Demons_."

"You probably just knocked the books over yourself because you were getting too handsy," said Matilda, not impressed.

"We were not. This is a library, it has rules. I respect libraries."

"But do you respect yourself?"

Steph grew very huffy after that and sat back down. Hannah had returned to her original seat looking thoroughly embarrassed.

"Are you going to clean up those books, Stefani, or wait until Mrs Henderson has to come over and do it? With her back?" Clara challenged, bringing up the librarian, who was a favourite of the kids and nearing retirement.

"I didn't knock them off!" Steph protested. Clara looked at her sternly. "You know what?" Steph began, standing up, "I won't put up with this sort of thing." Then she went to put the books back anyway, albeit making a lot of disgruntled noises.

Clara watched her go then rolled her eyes, before turning back to Hannah, "I heard you have some questions about Lysander?"

"…Not about Lysander, I was reading something about, like him using rhyming couplets, and I didn't really get it, because all the characters speak in rhyme," said Hannah. Clara was impressed by her reading around the subject.

"Okay, well, I don't know that you'd have to note this in your coursework, but I'll show you something," she flipped back through Alice's copy of _Midsummer_ to find a certain passage, "Alright, the interesting device is shared couplets, which Lysander is using to seduce Helena here."

"But if they all speak in rhyme _already_ -" Hannah began.

"I'll explain, look; Helena thinks he might be dead, so she says, ' _Lysander if you live, good sir awake_ ,' then he says-"

" _And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake_ ," said the Doctor a little loudly, overhearing. Clara looked up to see the Doctor smiling at her and couldn't help but smile back for a second before realising it was a touch unprofessional, clearing her throat and getting back to what she'd been doing.

"Uh, yes, that's what he says," she said, hoping she wasn't blushing. The Doctor leant over the back of her chair.

"They do all speak in rhyme," she said, "But we're all speaking in, y'know, sentences. Prose. Even if you don't rhyme, there's still something intimate about finishing someone else's sentences. That's what Shakespeare is showing by having Lysander finish Helena's couplet."

"But Helena doesn't like Lysander," said Hannah.

"Right, that's why it's only Lysander who finishes her couplets at this point, to show it isn't reciprocated," said Clara, then to the Doctor, "Go back to your space stuff, leave me alone."

"Fine, fine… what was I talking about? Oh, yeah – Schwarzschild radii… wait, one more thing," she caught Clara's attention again, "Mattie's coming with us to get pumpkins straight after school, right?"

Clara sighed and asked Matilda – because the Doctor apparently couldn't do it, "Are you coming with us to get pumpkins straight after school?"

"Yeah, fine, whatever…" she mumbled, never a fan of them acknowledging that she lived with them while she was around her peers.

"Awesome!" the Doctor smiled, "I'm gonna buy every single pumpkin they've got."

"Mm, I don't think you are," said Clara.

"I'm gonna buy at least one pumpkin. But it's gonna be the best pumpkin this planet has ever seen, mark my words. As soon as I think of a good name for it."

"You can call it Squash," said Clara.

"Yes! We are _so_ on the same page today, Oswald. Squash it is, and I can't _wait_ to meet him…"

* * *

" _He did the mash, he did the monster mash; the monster mash, it was a graveyard smash; he did the mash, it caught on in a flash; he did the mash, he did the_ -"

"Okay, do we have to listen to this while I try to drive?" Clara said loudly, cutting across the Doctor's singing along to an ancient CD of Halloween party songs she'd found somewhere. As usual, the Doctor was sandwiched in the middle of the van's front seat, with Mattie leaning on the door also looking thoroughly displeased with the Halloween medley they were being subjected to.

"Do you want me to put _This is Halloween_ on again?"

"You're gonna pay for this. It's going to be Mariah Carey every single day in December."

"Is it too late for me to go and live on Rose's TARDIS?" asked Mattie.

"You'll be getting kicked out if you disrespect Mariah like that again," said Clara. Mattie ignored her. The Doctor started singing along to _Monster Mash_ again as they drove out of Brighton, heading towards a farm just outside of the city where they could get some good quality pumpkins the day before Halloween.

"Why did you come to the library at lunch?" Matilda asked after getting tired of listening to the Doctor.

"Are you upset about that?" asked Clara.

"About that? No, I was just…" but she did seem a little melancholy.

"Sarah and Kyle were being _very_ obnoxious," said the Doctor, "It turned into a shouting match eventually. Something to do with Pizza Hut, I don't know. Hard to follow."

"I don't think Pizza Hut was the issue," said Clara.

"Look, all I know is they were yelling about dough balls and it was all very intense, and then she broke a mug. I wasn't sure we'd get out of there alive."

"Don't tell your friends," Clara added, "My office has a leak in the window that needs to be fixed, not very nice in the storm." It was still raining, albeit gentler than it had been for most of the day.

"I won't tell them about Pickman and Chapel. But you have to tell me what happened last night."

"What do you mean?" asked Clara carefully.

"When Hannah's dad showed up and then you were being weird." Clara didn't say anything, contemplating this and trying to watch the road in the poor weather.

"C'mon, Coo," said the Doctor, "If you told Steph, you can tell Matts."

"Well, it concerned Steph," said Clara.

"What does? What was it?" Mattie asked, "Steph didn't say anything."

"Good. Look, it's not important, I don't want you to worry about it," said Clara, spotting the sign for the turn-off to the farm, "He just wanted to talk to me about Steph and Hannah. He wants me to encourage them to break up."

" _What_? What did you tell him?"

"That it's not my place or job to get involved with their personal lives, obviously," she said, "I'm not going to do it. I just told Steph because I thought she should know." Like with Steph, Clara also left out the part about him threatening her job. She turned off onto a muddy dirt road and headed towards the farm, the carpark already quite full of people there to get last-minute pumpkins. The Doctor liked it there especially because it was owned and operated by American immigrants, and she liked to pretend she was one of them.

It didn't take long for Clara to find somewhere to park, the Doctor on the brink of exploding from the sheer excitement of buying a pumpkin. It took all her energy not to climb over Clara in her hurry to get out of the car, jumping down into the mud and putting up her umbrella – the one she'd reclaimed from Osgood's mansion, which she said belonged to her Seventh incarnation – going off and leaving Clara and Matilda to fend for themselves in the rain. It was a lucky thing Matilda had an umbrella of her own. Clara locked the van and left her wife to go pilfer the pumpkin fields for all they were worth. There were still quite a lot of vegetables left.

"Are you okay? You've been a bit glum today," Clara asked her, shuffling along underneath Mattie's umbrella. She could stop the rain with telekinesis but had to keep a low profile. Nobody could find out she was a Manifest.

"Yeah, no, I'm… fine," she said very unconvincingly, watching the Doctor jump over a low wooden fence to get into the pumpkin fields to start examining the vegetables. Clara also watched her fondly for a few seconds but was more concerned with Matilda.

"You sure? If you want to go home, we can go back now, and I'll bring her here on her own later."

"No, you don't have to do that," said Mattie quickly.

"I don't mind the drive. And it's still early, it's only four."

"I just… you'll laugh at me."

Clara frowned, "I won't laugh at you, especially not if something's the matter. Promise." The Doctor wasn't paying them any notice, and Clara didn't have enough of opinion on pumpkins to care about what she was up to, instead patiently waiting for Mattie to answer. She took the umbrella to hold in the meantime, needing to occupy her hands as another cigarette craving came over her.

"I… it…" she rubbed her lazy eye, which she was prone to do whenever she was agitated.

"Don't do that, you'll make it worse," said Clara.

"…Me and dad used to carve pumpkins every year for Halloween. It feels weird to do it when he's not here."

"You don't have to if you don't want," said Clara, "I get it. You don't have to do it without him." It had only been three months.

"But the Doctor-"

"Don't worry about her, she's just excitable. She'll understand. Are you sure you don't want to go wait at home?"

"It's… fine."

"If you want to leave, just let me know, yeah? I understand," Clara began to walk towards the pumpkin fields to re-join the Doctor, "My mum, see, taught me how to play the piano. Did I tell you that?"

"I don't think so."

"She was going to be a concert pianist when she was young, but she broke her wrist and couldn't play well enough. She taught me as soon as I was old enough to understand what I was doing; I think I was six. It was like, our thing, that we always did together. Like carving a pumpkin every Halloween. And when she died… I never tell anyone I can play the piano anymore. The Doctor didn't find out for months. And I almost never play in front of anybody, even her. Feels like it's something… private. But you know something else?"

"What? This is a pretty sad story."

"I taught Oswin how to play. And that was cathartic, it made me feel better. Even though I still don't play for people." She paused for a while, standing a few feet away from the Doctor in the muddy rows of vegetables; she was crouching down and peering at the pumpkins in turn. She added to Mattie, "Things will… get easier. It's normal for them not to be easy right now."

"This bad boy looks pretty hot, don't you think?" the Doctor pointed out a pumpkin, shattering the mood and the sentiment behind Clara's story.

"Just choose whichever ones you like, sweetheart," Clara told her with a sigh, "We're getting three."

"I thought we were getting four?"

"Mattie doesn't want to carve one, so it's just three."

"But I wanted to stack them outside, in a trio."

"We'll put them either side of the door outside, okay?" said Clara, trying to placate her. The extra one was for the pumpkin pie she was going to bake that evening. The Doctor saw Clara's expression and knew not to press the matter of additional pumpkins any further.

"In that case, we're getting the biggest ones I can find."

"Okay, sweetheart," said Clara, then she added as an aside to Matilda, "She could buy her own pumpkins if she didn't refuse to get a phone or a bank account…"

"I heard that," said the Doctor, "And it's about money. I disagree with it, as a concept."

"How can you disagree with money?" Mattie asked.

"Come over here to help me look for rotten bits and I'll tell you _all_ about it," the Doctor offered, which wasn't _quite_ an invitation and more of an instruction. Regardless, Mattie was intrigued enough to talk to the Doctor about politics and Clara decided to let them be. As long as Mattie was alright she didn't mind and began examining the pumpkins herself.

Carrying Mattie's umbrella still, she stepped over a row to go further up the field because she thought she saw an especially large one, but then spotted something else that made her pause. One of the pumpkins, vividly orange, had a red mark on it. Intrigued, she stooped down as well as she could in the mud to get a look at it but couldn't quite work out what it was. The rain was steadily washing it away though, so it couldn't have been there for very long at all… Clara took a gamble and touched it with her finger; it came right off, staining her skin, but it couldn't be…?

She glanced around at the surrounding pumpkins and saw some more red blots, all also getting progressively fainter in the rain. The Doctor and Mattie still engaged in this or that, Clara decided to follow the red, going further and further up the field as the pumpkins got a higher and higher volume of stain. It was a trail, and it was leading somewhere: a crooked, lonely scarecrow, darkened from the rainstorm, was suspended from a wooden post at the top of the pumpkin patch. In typical fashion, this scarecrow had a pumpkin for a head – what else did she expect? – but it was surrounded by red on all sides. It looked to be oozing the fluid.

It was a little way off the ground, suspended higher than Clara could see properly. She drew as close to it as she could, her shoes caked in mud, holding the umbrella carefully as she stood on tiptoes to peer at it properly. Through the carved eye socket of the pumpkin, Clara's worst fears were confirmed. She found a milky eye looking back at her through the orange face. It was a dead body, killed very recently, and strung up in the pumpkin patch like an ornament. If she wasn't so desensitised to violence, she'd be horrified. She backed away slowly, not wanting to contaminate the crime scene any further, retreating towards the Doctor and Matilda.

"I need a word," she said, taking the Doctor's hand, "Matts, can you stay right here?" Clara told her seriously.

"Uh…" She returned Matilda's umbrella.

"Don't move from here. We'll be back in a second, okay? We're just going over here," Clara began to drag the Doctor to the side.

"What's going on, Coo? Are you alright?"

"Listen, listen," Clara lowered her voice, "Be discreet, okay?"

"Okay?"

"Do you see that scarecrow over there?"

"Yeah, what about it?"

"It's a body."

"Excuse me?"

"A dead body. There's blood on the pumpkins around it," said Clara.

"What? You're…?" the Doctor turned to look at it.

" _Yes_."

"It could be a stunt, Clara. It's Halloween, after all."

"No, it's not. Go wait with Mattie, I'm going to call the police, then we'll go tell the owners and stay at the van. We'll have to stay to talk to them."

"We'll _what_? We never talk to the police."

"Yeah, well, we have to, because we live here now, and we can't go around investigating murders on our own."

"You think it was _murder_?"

"Well I don't see how they made themselves into a scarecrow…" she said, taking her phone out. "Go make sure Mattie stays away from it, I'm not having her subjected to another dead body."

"I think it's a little late for that after we took her to meet Madame Tussaud… but sure. You talk to the feds; I'll be just over here."

* * *

Speyer had clocked out at eight that morning and was forced to drag himself out of bed after his nightshift to get back out by four, as another call about a strange murder came in. He always got the strange ones, the ones that often went unsolved. No forensics had come back from the Dennis Carter case that morning, and the CCTV cameras on the street had been smashed just around Victor's estimated time of death. If the MO wasn't so bizarre, he'd say it looked professional. But as odd as killing someone with asphyxiation via icing sugar was, this new incident where someone had been strung up like a scarecrow in the middle of a pumpkin patch, full of families coming to pick their vegetables for Halloween, was even odder.

Presley, once again, was the constable on the scene and the first Speyer met after finally getting to the rainy farm, a little out of the way of Brighton & Hove. It was almost out of their jurisdiction.

"Do we have an ID?" he asked her.

"Not yet, Sarge, we're working on it."

"She's young, might not even be eighteen yet," Victor, examining the body, said. The pumpkin that had been stuck on the victim's head had been removed and set to the side, a tent already set up on the premises to protect it from the rainfall and prying eyes. As usual, Speyer stuck his hands in his pockets.

"How did she die?"

"It's a nasty one," said Victor, "She's been gutted. Almost clean in half."

"What's the murder weapon?"

"From my preliminaries, I'd guess a scythe. Maybe a sickle, but the wound is too huge. I can let you know for sure once I've done the autopsy," he said.

"A scythe? And a scarecrow? The day before Halloween?"

"You think we have a Halloween-themed murder on our hands?" Presley asked him.

"Whoever did it went to the trouble of carving the pumpkin to put on her head. Are there any witnesses?"

"None, except for the woman who found the body," said Presley, "She says it was already strung up when she got here, and that she saw blood on the pumpkins."

"Very small window… is she still here?"

"Waiting by a bright blue, VW camper van. You probably saw it when you parked." He had seen it. He thought it was a ridiculous vehicle.

"Anything else?"

"Yes, this," said Victor, picking something up from the floor that had a plastic letter next to it. It was a large bar of chocolate, but while it looked factory-manufactured, with foil and paper wrapping, it didn't have a brand, a bar-code, any ingredients, or anything at all printed on it. Except for one word, written out in what appeared to be the victim's blood: 'ACE.'

"Ace? What does that mean? Is that her name, is it the killer's name? Is it a brand? Does it stand for something?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," said Victor, "But it's homemade, the chocolate. Like the icing this morning."

"…You don't think they're related?" he asked.

"I really don't know. I just do the post-mortems."

"Alright… our priorities are canvassing for potential witnesses and identifying the girl. I'm going to go talk to the woman who found the body and see if the owners have any scythes lying around."

Speyer ditched the tent to walk through the rain and get back to the carpark. People were getting turned away at the road to the farm by officers, while the people present when the body was found were being kept for questioning. The Volkswagen certainly stood out, and a woman got out to greet him as he approached. The passenger side window, behind her, was rolled down and a second woman leant out to listen in. Speyer took out his ID.

"DS Speyer; are you the one who found the body?" he asked, putting away the ID after a second and taking out his phone to write his notes on.

"Yes, I am," she said.

"Name?" he prompted.

"Clara, Clara Oswald." He thought he recognised that name from somewhere.

"Do you know what time you got here?"

"Ten to four, or thereabouts," she said, "We came straight after work."

"Where do you work?"

"Turing High School. I'm a teacher. This is my wife eavesdropping," Clara introduced the woman leaning out of the window.

"Hi," she said, looking at him suspiciously, "Did you say your name is Speyer?" She was American. He clenched his jaw.

"Yes, that's right. Detective Sergeant Benji Speyer." She must know his family history.

"Any relation to the war hero, Archie Speyer?"

"To the-? War hero?"

"Sailor who defused a sea mine single-handedly in 1944." Normally what he got was 'Archie Speyer, the mobster, whose family had stayed in organised crime for generations.'

"Um… he was my great-grandfather."

"And you're a cop in Brighton?" asked the American, "Isn't that like if Michael Corleone joined the FBI?"

"Why do you know so much about it?"

"I'm a history teacher," she said, "I've researched Brighton quite a lot."

"Yeah, okay. I'm not dirty, alright?"

"Wouldn't hold it against it if you were," she said. He didn't quite know what that meant.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"I'm the Doctor," she said. He made a start – that was the word written on the wall of the crime scene that morning. And now she was here at this one?

"Doctor who?" he asked.

"Theodora," Clara interrupted, answering for her like she didn't know what her own name was, "Dr Theodora Oswald."

"Eurgh," she made a face, "Just hearing it out loud makes me cringe. It's 'the Doctor,' if you don't mind. Everybody calls me that."

"So it's a nickname? How long have you had it?"

"As long as I can remember."

"Before you had a doctorate?"

She laughed, "A long time before."

"Can you account for your whereabouts between nine and ten o'clock last night?" he asked her.

"Excuse me?" she was alarmed.

"Where were you yesterday between nine and ten PM."

"I was at home."

"Can anyone corroborate that?"

"Sorry, you're asking me for an alibi? For what crime?"

"Please answer the question, ma'am."

"I was with her," a third person interrupted. Speyer hadn't seen the teenager girl in their van.

"Who's this?" he asked, suspicious.

"This is Mattie – Matilda. Smith-Jones. We're her legal guardians, she lives with us," said Clara stiffly, "She had friends over from school yesterday until just after nine, then I drove them both home and came straight back."

"So you were out driving between nine and ten? Where, exactly?" She was obviously annoyed at being asked these questions. "And what are these friends called?"

"Oh, for… Akiko Inoue and Stefani Kaczmarek. They were doing a science project."

"Inoue as in the Inoue Noodle Bar?"

"Yes."

"In North Laine?"

" _Yes_. I made sure she got in, her dad saw me out there and knows me from school, and then I drove Stefani back to her flat in Hanover and came home. I was barely out for half an hour."

"Have you ever been to Carter's Confectionary? It's a few doors down from the Inoue Noodle Bar."

"I… yes. A few times before."

"Are you aware that the owner of Carter's Confectionary was murdered last night, between nine and ten?"

" _What_? No, I… but…" she had a strange reaction.

"Do you have something to tell me?"

"Well, the lights were on. I remember seeing. I pointed it out to Steph." On the face of it, Speyer didn't think either Mrs or Dr Oswald was behind the crimes, but he couldn't shake the feeling that they were somehow connected. He'd investigate their alibis, but they had quite a few witnesses for their whereabouts. "What happened? How did he die?"

"He was asphyxiated, with icing sugar."

" _Icing sugar_?" she asked.

"And the word 'DOCTOR' was written on the wall of the crime scene in the very same icing sugar." He scrutinised their reactions carefully but couldn't quite read them.

"There are a lot of doctors in the world," said Clara.

"And how many of them have a connection to both of these unusual crime scenes?"

"We both have alibis," said the Doctor firmly.

"Can I have a look in the back of this van?"

"Do you have a warrant?" the Doctor asked.

"It's fine, sweetheart," said Clara, shaking her head and going to open up the side door. He wouldn't have been happy if they made him go and get a warrant to look inside. He was looking for the murder weapon, the scythe Victor said had been used to kill the girl. There was some camping equipment, spare clothes and shoes, but nothing initially of note. He didn't think they'd done it. He could easily check with the school whether they'd been in until the end of the day, and there wasn't time between then and now to carry out such an elaborate murder. Maybe they were the targets?

"One more question," he said as Clara closed the van, "Does the word 'ACE' mean anything to you? Could be initials, could be a name?"

"Nothing," said the Doctor firmly, "Why?" Speyer narrowed his eyes at her.

"The scarecrow had an unbranded, home-made bar of chocolate found on her body. It has 'ACE' written on it in what we're assuming is her own blood."

"Sorry, officer. It doesn't mean anything to us." Speyer looked at Clara to prompt her to answer.

"I have no idea what it means. Sorry."

"Did you see anybody suspicious around Carter's Confectionary while you were there last night? Apart from the lights being on."

"Nothing. I didn't know I should have been looking. Otherwise, I would have called the police like I did today when I found that body in the field." He supposed she had a point. "Are we free to leave yet?"

"Can I get an address and a phone number? In case of any follow-up questions. We'll need to call you into the station to make an official statement regarding last night's incident and your discovery of the body." Clara sighed, irritated, but rattled off their address and her mobile number as quickly as she could. "If you head down there as soon as possible, within the next week ideally."

"Yes, sure…"

Speyer stepped back from the van, "Drive safe. Let me know if you stumble across any more murders."

"Ha, ha… I'll try not to…" she grumbled, walking around to the right-hand door on the other side to get back in.

Clara was grateful he hadn't ordered her to present herself to the police station that very evening. She almost wished they didn't live permanently in 2064, or she could've gotten away with not dealing with the bureaucracy of the criminal justice system. They couldn't very well find a body and then sneak off without telling anyone about it.

There was silence in the van as she drove.

"…Do you want to go to the supermarket to get some cheap pumpkins?" Clara asked eventually. Mattie was now relegated to the middle, with the Doctor by the passenger door. The Doctor didn't answer. "Doctor?"

"Huh?" she looked over. She was deep in thought about something.

"…What's going on?" asked Clara seriously.

"I do recognise the name."

"What name?"

"Ace... I think these murders are messages. Messages for me."

" _What_?"

"And I think I know who the culprit is, too…"


	35. Trick or Treat - Chapter 3

_Trick or Treat_

 _3_

Benji leant on the side of his battered old car, smoking a cigarette. It was getting on for eight in the evening. He'd had to cut his shift short so he could come and collect Katie from the Halloween school disco; it was the party for the younger kids that night at Turing High. There was no way he was letting his eleven-year-old daughter go anywhere on her own with these particular crimes currently afoot. There were a lot of adults milling around out there, many of them giving him dirty looks for smoking at all, and especially near a school. It probably wasn't allowed on school premises, so he took another drag and then flicked the butt away, stubbing it out in a puddle. Katie hated him smoking, she was always trying to get him to stop; Maria, too, complained about it whenever she saw him, asked him not to do it around their daughter – which he never did, but she never ceased to remind him.

Before long, kids accompanied by a handful of teachers began to file out of the front doors, dressed in their Halloween costumes, carrying bags of sweets and laughing. Benji was so detached from pop culture that he didn't recognise what most of them were even dressed as, aside from the cliché ghosts, ghouls and goblins. He barely even knew what Katie had gone as, just that she was wearing a very hard to find princess costume. He'd had to get the train into London to find somewhere that had it in stock; probably because he'd left it too late. But he'd still recognise her anywhere, and she came ambling out of the school with her friends. When she saw him she beamed and ran straight over. He wondered how long it would be until she stopped being happy to see him.

"Careful, there," he said, crouching a little, "You don't want to slip and hurt yourself."

"You're not late this time," Katie said. That stung – 'this time.'

"I got off work early," he said, "To make sure you're alright."

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well… you would, of course," he said quickly, then went to change the subject, "Did you have a good time at the disco?"

"Yes! Look at all these sweets I got," she showed him her haul, "It's especially good because _you_ won't let me go trick or treating." She'd been guilt-tripping him about that for over a week now, but with these new murders, he was even more rigid in not letting her go wandering around the streets and knocking on doors.

"Just don't eat them all at once, you know what your mother will say if you need another filling."

"She'll tell _you_ off for letting me eat sweets." That was exactly what Maria would do when she got back into the country next week. He usually only had Katie on the weekends when he was able to get time off work; during the week was very chaotic, but she'd had to go back to Barcelona for a funeral.

"It's Halloween! You can have as many sweets as you want if you brush your teeth." Probably not the best move for responsible parenting, but he wanted to avoid more arguments about trick or treating.

"You should brush your teeth. Your breath smells again." Because he'd been smoking. He sighed.

"I'll have a mint in the car," he said, straightening up and turning to open the car door.

As he did this, he glimpsed something very unusual on the road near the school. Tearing away into the night was an ice cream van. Benji wasn't used to seeing ice cream vans driving around in the evening in October, but while that piqued his interest, it wasn't the strangest thing about the vehicle: that award went to the driver. He was only able to glimpse the figure in the front, but it was sickeningly familiar. He could have sworn they resembled the bizarre costume found in Carter's Confectionary early that morning, the animatronic mascot that had been lingering ominously by the light switch, that was so unnerving nobody had bothered to turn the lights on. But how could an empty costume be driving an ice cream van around? And why at that time of night?

He dug a pen out of his pocket and scribbled the digits of the number plate onto the back of his hand. IEZ 567. Much worse than that though was that as the van passed, a handful of the children deigned to wave to it and shout, including Katie.

"Who's that?" he asked her.

"It's the Candy Man," she answered him.

"Who's the Candy Man…?"

"He did the DJing."

"…Wait in the car for me a minute, Katie."

"Why? Where are you going?"

"Have a word with your teachers," he said, taking out his keys to unlock the car, "Don't leave the car, alright?"

"Can I go talk to my friends?"

"No," he said, a little too sharply. He clenched his jaw. "Please, princess, I need you to say in the car, I won't be long. You can get started on your sweets, alright?" She wasn't too happy about this, but at least she obeyed him. He didn't often give her specific orders or instructions. She wandered around to the passenger side and got in. Benji took extra care to make sure the vehicle was locked as he went to find a member of staff.

Clara Oswald, a teacher at that school, was a circumstantial witness to Dennis Carter's murder, the very same place where the odd costume had been. Then she had found the second body earlier that evening, and now the same costume had appeared at an event full of children at the same school she taught in. And there was the matter of her wife's nickname 'Doctor', appearing at the same murder scene that morning – another teacher. What was the connection? Were they really responsible, despite having alibis? And he wasn't sure either of them could fit in such a large costume; they were both barely five foot tall.

But he didn't see either of them there that night, instead settling on the closest pair of adults, two middle-aged women who didn't seem to be having an awful lot of fun being there.

"Excuse me," he asked, catching their attention, "Could I have a word with you?"

"What's the matter, mister…?" the older woman asked him curtly.

"Speyer," he said, "Detective Sergeant. I'm Katie's father."

"I don't know a Katie Speyer."

"Fuentes," he corrected awkwardly, "It's Katie Fuentes. She has her mother's name." Because his name belonged to a crime family, and his ex-wife's didn't.

"I hear she's very bright," the woman smiled, "Is she having a problem in school?"

"Not that I know of… could I get your names? I have some questions about your DJ, for an inquiry." He got out his phone to take his usual notes.

"Really?" she was surprised, "I'm Celia Frost."

"Debbie Tierney," said the second woman. He wrote down their names.

"Was that the DJ in the ice cream van that just drove off?"

"Oh, yes, that's him."

"What's his name?"

"He has the kids call him the Candy Man," said Celia Frost, "It's a play on his name."

"Which is…?" he prompted again.

"Andy K. Man."

"It's…?" he asked incredulously, frowning, "Are you sure?"

"Yes," said Frost firmly.

"Odd name."

"He had a full DBS check, detective. Are you accusing us of something? Of not doing our due diligence with the children in our care?" He could well be, but he would look into this alleged DBS check himself.

"Why does he drive an ice cream van if he's a DJ?" Benji asked next.

"I don't know. To be quirky, or something. Stand out," Frost shrugged.

"Do you have a phone number for him? An address?"

"…I'll go speak to reception for you," she said, irritated, taking her leave. Now he was left with Debbie Tierney. He had a different line of questioning for her.

"What subjects do you and Ms Frost teach, exactly?"

"She's the Head of Science. I teach English," she said.

"English? So you'll know Clara Oswald?"

Tierney scowled, "Yes."

"Not a fan of her?"

"I've been a teacher here for fifteen years. She hasn't even been here for two, and she saunters in and snatches the head of department job as _soon_ as Rhonda retired. Completely out of her depth. She isn't even thirty. And I don't think much of her professionalism."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm just not sure married couples should be teaching in a school alongside each other."

"Why?" he probed.

"It can distract the children, the two of them. Especially the boys."

"Are they bad teachers? Clara and – what's her wife called, again?" He knew but wanted to hear Debbie's answer.

"The Doctor."

"That's her name?"

"Her name is… do you know, I'm not even sure. Everybody only ever calls her either 'the Doctor' or 'Dr Oswald.'" So it really was a prevalent name. Prevalent enough that somebody wanting her specific attention would write it on the wall of a crime scene, maybe.

"Do the kids like them?"

"Yes, for some reason," she said bitterly.

"Do they get good grades?"

"What's this about, detective?" she snapped, "You ask about our DJ, then you ask about two of our teachers? For an 'inquiry'? You're not going to get into Clara Oswald's knickers." He was aghast at the suggestion but couldn't tell her the truth without compromising the investigation. Besides, he still didn't actually know if they were suspects or not.

Before he had to answer, Frost returned carrying a sheet of paper she handed over to him. It had written on it the name 'Andy K. Man', along with a phone number.

"No address?" he asked.

"No. Is that everything?" she asked coldly. "If it's that important, he's here for the second disco tomorrow night. The one for the older children."

"Along with the Oswalds you're so interested in," said Debbie.

"What do you want with them?" Frost was surprised.

"Routine questions," he said, "I'll let you know if I need anything else."

"Like what? Clara's phone number?" Debbie asked him. He thought _she_ was the one whose professionalism was somewhat lacking.

"Thank you for your time," he ignored that comment and turned to leave, hearing the pair of them muttering about them as he did. Maybe they didn't believe he was a detective; he hadn't shown his badge, after all.

Benji was relieved that Katie was still waiting for him in the car, and he promptly returned to take her home.

"Am I in trouble?" she asked as he got into the car.

"No, nothing like that…" he said, starting the engine, "How are you finding big school, then? How are your teachers?"

"It's great! I'm in all the top sets." He'd known that already.

"Who's your favourite teacher?"

"Oh, I don't know… probably Mrs Oswald. She never shouts, even when people are being awful."

"Never?"

"No. And she's never angry when people get things wrong or don't know the answer to a question." She didn't sound like a sadistic murderer, and he trusted what Katie thought about people. She had good instincts. "Can we listen to the radio, dad?" He turned on the radio and let her change the station to whatever she wanted, deep in thought about the crimes, about 'Andy K. Man', and about Dr and Mrs Oswald.

All the way home, Katie talked his ear off about what had happened at the disco, her and her friends dancing to whatever the popular songs were, and she made more than a few attempts to get him to change his mind about the trick or treating yet again. He tried his best to listen to her but was desperate to get back to his computer and invest in a little overtime. So desperate that when they finally did get home, he let her take her sweets off into her room to go to bed, something Maria would give him hell for next week when she returned to England.

Benji made himself a coffee, which he sorely needed, and sat down at the kitchen table of his small flat with Katie in her room. He couldn't afford a bigger place and had relegated himself to the much smaller bedroom so that Katie could have the larger one - even though she was only there a few days a week.

The first thing he did was a search for this alleged DBS check of one 'Andy K. Man.' It was only dated to around a week or so ago, saved onto the police database as a request for a criminal record, but he couldn't find anything wrong with it. It didn't say what the 'K' stood for, which Benji thought was an oversight, but it wasn't fraudulent. So he ran the number plate from the ice cream van next, IEZ 567, and that was when things got interesting. The picture on the registration for the van was the same as the DBS check, except the van wasn't registered to Andy K. Man, it was registered to one Daniel Nelson. And it had also been reported missing a week ago, the same date of the DBS check, in Surrey. After running a search for Daniel Nelson, he was even more disturbed to find that, just like the van, he'd also been reported missing.

He decided to try the phone number he'd been given at the school, but it went immediately to voice mail, so it must have been turned off. The voice mail was for Daniel Nelson. Either Nelson had gone AWOL and decided to become a murderer, or there was a third victim the police didn't yet know about. Benji had the sickening feeling it was the other. Knowing he couldn't leave Katie on his own to go investigating this further that night, however, he decided to call the police station to get an all-points warning on the ice cream van. While doing this he did get a few laughs, until he stressed that he was serious and reiterated that the van had been reported missing.

Then he found himself debating whether or not to call Clara Oswald. He knew she, or her wife, was wrapped up in it somehow but was now thinking that maybe even they weren't quite sure of the extent. Did he need to warn her? Warn her to keep an eye out for an ice cream van, let him know if she saw one? He still had his phone in his hand and was beginning to formulate what he was going to say, when it rang. For a moment he thought it would be the mobile of Daniel Nelson calling him back, but it wasn't. It was Maria. He sighed and put the phone to his ear to answer.

"Hi," he said.

" _Hey, Ben…_ "

"How was the funeral today?" It had been her grandmother's, Katie's great-grandmother.

" _It was, um… weird. Sad._ "

"When are you coming back?"

" _Sunday, early morning. It was going to be Saturday, but some things came up with the wills… how are you getting on with Katie?_ "

"Fine, she's good. She had a lot of fun tonight at the Halloween disco."

" _They still do those in high school?_ "

"There's another one tomorrow for the older kids."

" _Are you taking her trick or treating_?"

"No."

" _What? Why not? She loves going every year_." Maria always took her.

"I… there's some stuff going on. At work."

" _What stuff_?" she asked seriously.

"Strange murders. We're looking into the possibility they're connected."

" _…Maybe I should come back sooner_."

"If you need to be there for the wills-"

" _Ben, if you're worried, then I'm worried. Do you want me to come back and take her home while you work on this case?_ "

"I'm capable of taking care of my own daughter."

" _I never said you weren't, but you know how you get when there's a case like this. If she's not your number one priority, I can come back to Hove tomorrow instead. The flight isn't long_." Benji didn't say anything. "… _At least let me talk to her_."

"…Yeah. Yeah, okay…" he stood up, "I'll go give her the phone."

* * *

Matilda paced up and down in her bedroom, her laptop sitting on her desk with a video call set up between Stefani and Aki so that they could continue to work on their project. At least, that was the premise; in actuality, they were discussing the only thing it seemed reasonable to discuss: the murders. Steph had already had an unpleasant but brief encounter with DS Speyer asking her to corroborate Clara's story about being outside the sweetshop the previous night, and Aki's father had also been questioned because the Inoue Noodle Bar was only a few doors downed and they thought he could be a witness. But like Clara, Aki and Steph had seen nothing amiss except for the lights being on. As for the second murder… they were quizzing Mattie for everything she could remember. But despite her other vivid encounters with the dead – Mrs Ward and her cat, Madame Tussaud's workshop, Marie Antoinette's reanimated corpse, et cetera – this time she'd been kept well away from the body Clara had found.

" _It's the demon_ ," said Steph through the camera, " _It's killing people, doing all this fucked up shit, I know it_."

"It's not a demon," said Mattie, though she was getting less and less convinced by her own words.

" _If it's not a demon then why are you so freaked out_?"

"Because! Clara's sort-of involved with two awful murders…" she said. What she hadn't mentioned was the words at the crime scene: that 'Doctor' had been found at Dennis Carter's shop, and 'Ace' had been found on the body at the pumpkin farm.

" _She's not involved,_ " said Aki, " _I mean, like, she's got an alibi. She was at her house last night and then she was at school all day_."

"I don't think Clara's the killer, she might…" Be the target? Was that really what Mattie was suggesting? "Look, look," she shook her head and pulled out her desk chair, sitting down in front of the camera but still tapping her foot, "Let's not talk about this."

" _You don't wanna talk about the demon we summoned to kill Clara_?"

"You summoned it!" she exclaimed.

" _So you admit, the demon exists_ ," said Steph.

"No! Of course the demon doesn't… there's no demon."

" _We need a Ouija board. We could banish it_."

"No way. I'll kill you myself before you pull out a Ouija board," Mattie threatened her.

" _Oh my god_ ," Steph dropped the pen she was holding, " _Mattie's possessed by the demon. She's the killer._ "

" _I kind of just want to do the homework…_ " Aki mumbled.

"Yes, the homework…" Mattie picked up her own pen.

" _Are you two still going to the disco?_ " Steph asked.

"Why wouldn't we be?" said Mattie.

" _I don't know. Afraid you're gonna get murdered by the demon, I guess_ ," she shrugged, rolling her pen between her fingers on her desk. " _Think about it, how would you know who it is_?"

"Because I recognise the people we go to school with."

" _You've only been at school for two months_ ," Steph reminded her.

"What do you think a demon looks like?"

" _Like a person, I guess, if you can see them. I mean… they have to be convincing to trick people, or whatever_."

Mattie shook her head, "I'm not… look, we just need to explain redshift. The Doctor said it's about inflation and things in space moving away from each other-"

" _How's your Halloween costume going_?" Steph interrupted again.

"It's fine."

" _Come on! You're the horror movie, special effects nerd. You're probably gonna win the award for best costume._ "

" _There isn't an award for best costume_ ," said Aki.

"My costume is fine. I can't do most of it until tomorrow. I've got the clothes done and the stuff I need for the makeup. What about you two?"

" _I'm going as the Lightning Girl_ ," said Aki. Mattie almost laughed. Not out of maliciousness, but at how strange the idea was. Somebody dressing up as Esther Drummond, of all people. She picked up her phone and opened her messages app, writing out a text to Esther, who'd been talking to her recently about comparing zombie designs in different works.

 _My friend Aki is dressing as the Lightning Girl for Halloween_ , she wrote. Of course, Esther being an American (who lived with a vampire), she loved Halloween more than life itself.

" _How're you gonna do that cool mask she has_?" Steph asked. They'd both met her now, after the incident with the trees, not knowing quite enough about who Esther was for the excitement to be lost on them. It _was_ a cool mask though, built by Oswin like the rest of her equipment, so Mattie was also interested to see how Aki would replicate its digital fluidity.

" _They sell, like, versions_."

"They're unlicensed, though," said Matilda. Esther didn't like people making merchandise of her.

" _It's not like I know where she got her stuff to begin with. She looks like something from outer space_ ," said Aki. And there was a good reason for that. Mattie's phone buzzed.

 _Neat! Send pics!_ Esther's message read. Mattie responded saying she would tomorrow when she saw the costume.

"What are you going as, Steph?" Mattie asked.

" _Dunno. Maybe a witch. I've got a hat_."

"Wow. That's the laziest Halloween costume idea I've ever heard."

" _Fuck you, zombie girl. You could be dead for real if the demon gets you tomorrow, maybe you shouldn't even bother with the costume_."

"There's no demon! Piss off!"

" _Getting pretty agitated about something you don't believe in_."

"I'm agitated about _you_. You're _annoying_." She heard someone laugh in the background of Steph's webcam, which succeeded in getting on her nerves more than what Mattie had said.

" _Fuck off, Jake_ ," Steph said.

" _What?_ " asked Jakub, who must be hiding somewhere out of frame; Mattie hadn't known he was there. He appeared after a few moments, lingering in the background to squint at Steph's computer screen. " _It's true, you're annoying… hey_." He held up his hand in a small wave at both Aki and Mattie.

"Um, hi," said Mattie, who never talked to Jakub. Aki also mumbled something unintelligible.

" _What are you talking about demons for_?" he asked.

" _Would you stay out of my business_?" Steph snapped at him. He looked at the webcam, prompting one of the girls to reply to him.

"It's nothing," said Mattie, "Steph tried to summon a demon when she was here last night."

" _And it's already killed two people_."

"I'm sure that those people were killed by… a totally normal sadistic murderer. Who isn't a demon," said Mattie. She wasn't convinced about it being 'totally normal' though, not when it had so thoroughly caught the Doctor's interest.

" _Wait, what murderer? Is that why the police were here earlier? Steph, I'm gonna have to tell mum if_ -"

" _Don't tell her anything_ ," Steph told him off quickly, " _It's nothing. We just saw a sweetshop with the lights on when Mrs Oswald drove me home yesterday, that's it_." Steph was able to join the video call because she was home alone that evening. Aside from Jake, apparently.

" _What happened at the sweetshop_?"

" _The owner was murdered_ ," said Steph, " _The police think it might be related to this murdered girl Mrs Oswald found at a pumpkin farm earlier_."

" _What? Mrs Oswald has been at two murder scenes_?"

" _Yeah, because of the demon_ ," said Steph.

"There is no demon!" Mattie exclaimed, growing more and more frustrated, "You didn't summon a demon with the fucking washing up bowl, I swear to… you know, I'm going. I'm not in the mood."

" _Chill out! It's just a joke_ ," said Steph. Aki didn't say anything but did look up in surprise. Jake, too, was confused.

"Well I don't think it's very funny, alright? That's two people who are dead and whoever did it is still out there," said Mattie. "I'm gonna do my bit of the homework that's due _tomorrow_ , and you two can do your bits, and then it'll be finished."

" _Mattie, you're not going?_ " Steph didn't know she was serious.

"Yes, I'm going to sit downstairs." She started to pack up her stuff. "If you need anything _important_ , just text me. But it better not be about demons, or I'll block you." And she unceremoniously slammed the computer screen down, probably a little too hard, before sitting back in her chair. She did not like Steph making jokes about the murders when she didn't know that they were targeting the Doctor.

She decided she was serious about going to sit downstairs and picked up her computer with her notebook, pen and phone balanced on top. She almost tripped over her own shoes and some other objects on her way down the attic stairs that she had been meaning to tidy up for a while; the more she thought about cleaning though, the messier it seemed to get.

In the living room, Clara was curled up on her own on the sofa reading a book and the Doctor was sitting in the large, novelty egg chair next to the fish tank with her eyes glued to her own laptop. Clara looked up when Mattie came in and plonked herself down in the armchair closest to the window and the television, on the opposite side of the room to the Doctor. It was the chair Rose occupied when she was there, but she wasn't coming to visit until the weekend.

"Coming to hang out with us?" Clara asked.

"Steph was just… I don't know, being Steph, I guess."

"Oh yeah?" Clara looked up from her book.

"What's going on with these murders? Is it to do with you?" Mattie asked abruptly, the thing that was really on her mind, "Are they going to try and kill the two of you?"

Clara sighed, "I know as much as you, sweetheart. She's not telling me anything at the moment." The Doctor didn't say a word, she wasn't listening at all. "As soon as she decides she wants to talk, you'll know what's going on, I promise."

"…What about that stuff with Hannah's dad?"

"Nothing else has happened."

"The police talked to Steph."

"Did they? Is she alright?"

"I think so."

"…Are _you_ alright?"

"Why are you always asking me if I'm alright?" she questioned.

"I knew it!" the Doctor announced suddenly, startling them both. Mattie dropped her pen. She got up from her chair to bring the laptop over to show Clara, muttering something. Clara sat up a little. "Didn't I say? I can hardly believe this…"

"You haven't said anything, darling."

"Look! He's right there, in the crime scene photos from the sweetshop," the Doctor pointed something out on the laptop screen. Mattie put her stuff down on the chair to come over and see; neither of them stopped her. She was showing them a shadowy figure in the background of a photo of Mr Carter, lying dead at the bottom. The image was zoomed in though, so the body wasn't fully visible. The thing in the background looked a bit like a giant man made out of sweets.

"What is that?" Clara asked, frowning, "It looks like a… mascot, or a costume, or… one of those animatronics you get in those weird restaurant chains in America. With the instruments."

"I'll bet that's what the fuzz thought, too," said the Doctor, "Talk about hiding in plain sight. _That's_ the murderer."

"Bertie Bassett the liquorice man?" Clara asked.

"No! Not Bertie Bassett – what's the matter with you?" Clara just shrugged. The Doctor tutted.

"Is it a costume?" asked Matilda.

"It's a robot called the Kandyman. He's an executioner built by a dictator, Helen A, on Terra Alpha, a human colony way in Earth's future. The whole idea was that no one was allowed to be anything other than happy and joyful. Otherwise, you'd be taken away by the Happiness Patrol and branded a 'killjoy', and if you behaved badly enough, you'd get executed by this guy with his Fondant Surprise." Deep down, Matilda was a little bit relieved that it wasn't actually a demon.

"With his…? Sorry, what?" asked Clara, "Is that a euphemism?"

"Fondant Surprise," the Doctor repeated, "He'd drown people in big vats of boiling, liquid candy. That detective and the autopsy report say that Carter was choked to death on icing sugar."

"You're sure that's what this is?"

"Yes, I was there with Ace. And then a girl who looks kinda like Ace, with a weird, home-made chocolate bar that has 'ACE' written on it in blood – after another crime scene with _my_ name written on the wall – turns up dead in a field. Both crime scenes are themed. I think us showing up at them is a coincidence, sort of."

"Themed?" asked Clara.

"Around candy, Halloween, that sort of thing," she said, "Best time of year for the Kandyman to be wandering around. Looks like just another schmuck in fancy dress, albeit very elaborate fancy dress… Helix, you can see my computer screen, right?"

" _Affirmative, Doctor. I have access to all electronics_ ," said Helix smoothly.

"Have you seen anything like this robot near our house?"

" _Negative, Doctor. Would you like me to increase my surveillance_?"

"Yes, this robot is dangerous. If you see it near the house, it's an emergency. Everybody needs to be warned."

" _Affirmative, Doctor._ "

"Well, the good news is that now the two of you know what he looks like you'll see him coming a mile away. He is _not_ subtle."

"What's the bad news?" asked Mattie.

"That I don't understand how nobody's seen this thing. Including us. That girl at the pumpkin farm was freshly murdered, and we were there for a while. So how's he hiding? In the middle of the day?" she mused.

"But what does it want?" Mattie asked.

"I don't know. Kill me, I guess. It is built to execute people; I must be the one that got away. I do wonder how he knows I'm in Brighton, though… I'll have to ask him."

"Ask him? What do you mean?" said Clara seriously.

"When we catch him, obviously. We have to go after him or he's just gonna keep killing people. He's trying to attract my attention, so let's give it to him. Anyway, he's not that frightening. Last time I sprayed him with lemonade and his feet got stuck to the floor."

"What? He's actually made of sweets?" Mattie asked.

"Bits of him are. All we have to do is fill the pressure washer with soda," she said.

"And that'll do what? Stick him to the floor? That's your grand plan?" Clara asked. "What did you do to him last time?"

"I didn't do anything. We put him temporarily out of action with some fire – Ace loves explosives – and went after Helen A, the demagogue. The Pipe People took care of the Kandyman, they melted him in his own fondant surprise. I'd love to know who rebuilt him, and why. His creator said he was better off dead," the Doctor explained, "The issue is, it's not very easy to get the means to deliver a couple gallons of molten candy… I don't have the right kind of instruments."

"Or a few gallons of solid candy to melt," Clara pointed out.

"See, this is the issue with having to live on Earth full time, worrying about getting arrested for arbitrary things like the possession of volatile explosives… I'm going upstairs. I need to look at my stuff. See if I can throw something together that doesn't look like a bomb." She stood up and pushed her laptop into Clara's hands, still with the crime scene photos blown up on its screen.

"Don't damage any of my books if you're building a bomb in there," Clara called after her as she disappeared out of the living room.

"I won't!" the Doctor assured her. Her footsteps faded away and Clara turned her attention to the computer, putting her book to the side and pulling it onto her lap. Mattie lingered awkwardly nearby.

"…She's not actually going to build a bomb, right?"

"I don't know. I doubt it, she doesn't like them," said Clara, "I'll let her have her fun with her gadgets."

"But you need a plan, right?" Mattie sat down on the arm of the sofa next to her so she could continue to spy on the computer. "You can't just let that robot wander around out there killing people."

"My telekinesis is just as powerful as Rose's super-strength, don't worry," Clara said, "This thing doesn't even look _that_ big. The Doctor would just rather everyone relies on her to save the day – she's got an ego."

"So do you," said Matilda.

"Thanks," Clara responded automatically, her typical response to being made fun of. She was made fun of frequently. "Can you grab my e-cigarette, please? It's by the fish tank."

"Smoking's bad for you," Mattie said, getting up to do as she was asked anyway.

"Yes, correct," Clara nodded, "Very bad. Technically not smoking since it's just vapour, but don't do it." Mattie picked up the device – of which Clara had a fair few, usually one in every room because the Doctor categorically would not let her smoke real cigarettes in the house (thankfully) – and brought it over.

"What are you doing?"

"I find it hard to believe that nobody has seen that thing walking around. Even if it is Halloween, you'd still definitely notice, wouldn't you?"

"Well, yeah." Clara began to fumble around next to her, muttering to herself about where she'd left her phone. She eventually found it stuck between the sofa cushions and wiped some lint on the screen, before unlocking it to do an internet search. She was searching for the pumpkin farm they'd been at earlier today. "What are you looking for?"

"Their phone number," she answered. It wasn't hard to find since the place was a public attraction. She dialled the number.

"Put it on speaker," Mattie implored. Clara sighed.

"Fine, fine…" she tapped the icon. It didn't take long to get an answer.

" _Hopkins Family Farm, Don Hopkins speaking_ ," said the middle-aged owner of the farm, whom the Doctor was on speaking terms with because she liked to pretend that she, like the Hopkinses, was an American immigrant. Though she normally told people she was from New York, and they were from somewhere in the Midwest. Wisconsin, or something.

"Hi, it's Clara Oswald," she said. A lull. "You know my wife, the Doctor. And it was me who found the body this afternoon."

" _Oh, yeah, Mrs Oswald. Are you doing okay after all that?_ "

"I'm fine, thanks… how's the farm after everything? Are the police still there?"

" _Yeah, they've got forensics out there now. They've taken the poor girl away, though._ "

"Do you know if they have any leads?"

" _Naw, sorry. That detective from earlier hasn't been back, I think it's his case. Tell you the truth, I don't know how the farm's going to recover after a crime like this. Nobody's going to want to buy pumpkins from us anymore_." Even the Doctor had decided against buying any pumpkins after the incident.

"You never know. People are forgetful in this country. Do you mind if I ask you a question, though?"

" _I've had nothing but questions all night_."

"Yeah, sorry about that… might be a bit of a weird question, though."

" _Shoot_."

"Well, have you seen someone in a very elaborate Halloween costume?"

" _It's Halloween tomorrow, Mrs Oswald, and I operate a pumpkin farm. I've seen plenty_."

"Right, but more specifically, this costume looks like a giant man made of sweets. Liquorice sweets, mostly. Like Bertie Bassett."

" _Oh, you mean Andy_?" Clara's blood ran cold.

"Andy?"

" _Andy K. Man_."

"Andy K. Man?"

" _That's the one. He drives an ice cream van_."

"His name is Andy K. Man and he drives an ice cream van?" she repeated. She sounded like a limerick.

" _The kids call him the Candy Man._ _He's a children's entertainer. Sort of like a clown. He was here today helping the kids carve their pumpkins, left just before you and the Doctor arrived_."

"Did you, um… I don't mean to sound like I'm making any accusations, but have you ever seen him out of his costume?"

" _Andy's very professional, won't take off his costume around the kids. Y'know, like one of those people who works at Disneyland_." Yeah, just like that, she thought dryly. " _He had all the right paperwork. A DBS check, and everything_." She knew DBS checks could be faked, though; she and the Doctor both had fake ones, not because they were criminals but because their whole identities were fraudulent. They had to pretend they'd been born in the late 2030s, and working in a school meant you couldn't escape from that sort of red tape.

"You've never seen his face, though?"

" _I saw it on his driver's license… oh, god, you don't think that Andy had something to do with this?_ "

"Um… I don't know."

" _Why would you ask?_ "

"Just because I saw him driving away, in the oncoming lane. In his ice cream van. Thought he looked a bit funny," she lied.

" _Oh. I'll have to go and tell the police about this_."

"Uh, yeah, sure… we'll see you around, Don."

" _Take care, Mrs Oswald. Tell your wife I said hi_."

"Okay, bye," she said, hanging up as quickly as she could. It wasn't the best way she'd ever ended a phone call, but she was distracted.

"So, he's not hiding at all?" Mattie asked after listening intently to the whole conversation.

"Hiding in plain sight," said Clara, "Literally, since he was in the bloody crime scene photos from the sweetshop." Since she was still tapped into the Sussex Police computer system, thanks to the Doctor trying to find the photos, she decided she'd take the opportunity to run a search for 'Andy K. Man' and see if anything _did_ come up.

Imagine her surprise when she found not only the DBS check Don Hopkins had just told her about, but also an APW that had been put out for an 'Andy K. Man' driving a suspect ice cream van registered to someone called Daniel Nelson, who'd been reported missing. She was even more surprised to see that the officer who'd put out the APW was Detective Sergeant Benjamin Speyer – how had _he_ come across this information?

"Come on," she said to Mattie, picking up the laptop and holding her vape pen between her teeth as she stood up.

"Where are you going?"

"Upstairs," she said. She had to tell the Doctor about this as soon as possible. Mattie followed in her wake, not wanting to be left out of all the excitement, as Clara entered the transdimensional study on the first floor. In there, the Doctor had arranged an array of water guns she'd found and was studying them all closely, crouching down and examining them in turn. Mattie wondered why she had so many water guns to begin with.

"Which one of these do you think is the best dispenser for lemonade?" she asked when she heard the door open.

"Forget about that, come and hear what I've just found," Clara bade her. Intrigued, the Doctor stood up.

"What's up?"

"I decided to call Don Hopkins and see if he's seen any Bertie Bassett lookalikes, and wouldn't you know, he seems to have hired your Kandyman to work as a children's entertainer at the farm. Left just before we arrived."

"Wait, what?"

"Don told me that they hired someone called 'Andy K. Man' to work as a sort of clown and that he had a DBS check and everything, but they never saw him take off his costume. I checked, he does have a DBS check, and he's currently wanted by the police in connection to Dennis Carter's murder. And that ice cream van he's driving his registered to someone called Daniel Nelson, who's gone missing, just like his van, last week on the other side of the county." She gave the Doctor her laptop back so that she could look at this new information.

"The cops are already looking for him?"

"Yeah, DS Speyer is the one who put out the APW."

"Really? I guess I didn't give him enough credit. But we can't let the cops arrest this guy, they'll find out he's a robot and he'll blow the lid on us. We have to find him first."

"Maybe we should talk to Speyer and see what he found?" Matilda suggested.

"Are you crazy? Talk to the feds? No way," said the Doctor, "We'll put out our own APW. Helix, how much of the city's security systems can you access for surveillance?"

" _99%, by my last estimate, Doctor_ ," said Helix.

"Great, keep an eye out not only for the Kandyman but also for this van, with the registration IEZ 567. And keep close tabs on the police dispatch. I wanna know immediately if there are any developments."

" _Affirmative, Doctor_."

"Awesome, thanks…"

"Well?" Clara prompted, "What now? We go out and look for him?"

"No, he'll come to us, eventually. What I need to do is get my hands on a whole lot of soda in a short space of time. That's my top priority. And put the finishing touches on my Halloween costume for the disco tomorrow." Of course, a psychotic robot had embarked upon a killing spree to get the Doctor's attention, but she was more interested in getting disco-ready. Typical.


	36. Trick or Treat - Chapter 4

**AN: SO, I had this finished and in my document manager ready to upload a week before Halloween, and then just forgot and thought I updated! So sorry about that! Happy belated Halloween on November 11th!**

 _Trick or Treat_

 _4_

Clara Oswald was drenched head to foot in blood. Wearing white, her face, hair, and most of her clothes were stained deep crimson. She was stacking buffet food on a paper plate, quite proud of her haul of party rings and sausage rolls.

"Why don't we have any mini sandwiches?" she asked, Sarah Pickman lingering next to her. Sarah was fighting with Kyle Chapel again and he was hiding on the other side of the school hall with Terrance Baxter, the other teacher vying very unprofessionally for Sarah's affection. "What kind of disco doesn't have mini sandwiches?"

"Can't believe you're eating buffet food," said Sarah, "It's not hygienic."

"It's fine, it's from Asda," said Clara, "It comes in a packet."

"I'm holding out for the chips."

"There are going to be chips!?" she exclaimed, half a party ring in her mouth, "I've got too many sausage rolls… I didn't account for the chips…" Clara turned away from the table to look across the hall, done out in Halloween decorations with obnoxious strobe lighting flashing overhead. _I Put a Spell on You_ was blaring very loudly overhead.

"…Terry's leering at me again," said Sarah.

"You sure? Maybe he's leering at Evelyn," said Clara, nodding at Evelyn Stark the art teacher, who was spinning about in the middle of the room in a floaty dress, imagining she was Stevie Nicks.

"Why would you say that? Do you think men don't want to leer at me?"

"I… sure, I mean, you're very… I'd leer at you," said Clara, not sure how she'd got stuck in this line of conversation.

"…Thanks," said Sarah a little smugly, like that was a compliment. Clara went back to her party rings, displeased.

"Look what I found!" the Doctor shouted, practically bouncing towards Clara she was so excited. For a minute, Clara thought she might have found the Kandyman tied up and deactivated around the back of the school she was so happy. But she'd actually found a few slices of cold pizza, which she then shoved into her mouth as quickly as possible. "This is amazing. I love discos," she said through chewed food. She was dressed in a bright green onesie.

"I'm glad you're happy, sweetheart."

"No pet names at the disco," Sarah snapped at them. Clara rolled her eyes.

"Nobody can hear us, they're listening to Screamin' Jay."

"This is _such_ a banger," said the Doctor, "We played this at our wedding."

"That's _it_ ," said Sarah, "I'm going to go give him a piece of my mind." And she took off to walk around the side of the room, avoiding the dance floor full of lairy teenagers. Clara knew they were getting alcohol from somewhere but had yet to find the source; some of them were definitely drunk.

"Are you sure Carrie isn't a bit too on-the-nose?" the Doctor asked Clara, stealing one of her sausage rolls and wrapping it up in her cold pizza slice. She ate it without flinching.

"It's a classic costume," said Clara, defending her choices, "And you're dressed as an alien." The onesie had an attached hood with black alien-shaped eyes in it, but she was also wearing oval sunglasses for good measure. Clara had no idea how much she could see.

"It's ironic," she said, "And it's not as violent. I didn't have to pour a bucket of fake blood on myself."

"I didn't make a mess in the garden just for you to mock my costume."

"You look like you've been in a car accident."

"Maybe I _have_ been in a car accident, what do you know?" Clara quipped. The Doctor dropped the subject. "Sarah told me they're bringing chips out in a bit."

"Chips!?" she exclaimed, "Are you gonna have room for chips with all those party rings?"

"Honestly, I was just thinking the same thing. It is a concern… where do you think they're keeping their booze?"

"Who?"

"The kids."

"The kids!? They're not allowed to drink, they're under eighteen."

"…Yeah, okay," said Clara, unconvinced by her naivety. "Steph might know. Maybe she'll tell me."

"Ask Mattie."

"No, I wouldn't ask her to betray her peers like that. And I trust her not to drink, anyway," said Clara.

"It's Halloween, let them live a little."

"Hang on…" she pointed across the room, "Kyle's got someone." Kyle was reprimanding Sam Howell just outside the boys' toilets, waving a bottle of Schnapps under his nose.

"Would you look at that, our jobs are done," said the Doctor. Kyle dragged Sam out of the room into the corridor by his elbow to tell him off properly. Clara wondered how many detentions he was going to get because of this incident, smuggling alcohol into a school disco. She doubted he was the only one, but at least somebody had been caught.

"Hopefully Sam flushed his weed. He'll have hell to pay if Kyle catches him with that," said Clara, "Can't really flush a bottle of Schnapps though. Because of the glass."

Elsewhere in the hall, Matilda was lurking awkwardly in a corner with a cup of squash, forced to hang around with Steph and Hannah. Steph was dressed as the laziest witch imaginable, wearing only a pointed hat, while Hannah had gone to quite a lot of effort to dress like an astronaut – she even had a helmet. It was never fun being around both of them at the same time, but at the moment all three of them were preoccupied with Sam getting harangued by Mr Chapel for bringing alcohol to the party.

"See, his mistake was bringing such a big bottle," said Steph knowingly, "You want to get the mini bottles that they have on planes. I've got a Smirnoff in my shoe right now."

"In a bottle, or just loose?" Mattie asked dryly.

"Swirling about in my sock, mate," said Steph, "I'll ring it out for you if you want? Sock shots."

"I'm gonna be sick…"

"What happened to Aki? Did she get murdered by the demon?" said Steph, completely ignoring Hannah who was trying to find out if she was serious about sneaking vodka into the disco.

"Shut up. She had to help her dad with the shop tonight." Somewhat predictably, Aki had bailed on another large social event; no pictures of her costume would reach Esther.

"I'm surprised _you_ haven't ditched since you're so scared of the demon," said Steph.

"There's no demon!" she exclaimed again.

" _Whatever_." Hannah jabbed her in the waist. "What?"

"Do you really have vodka?" she persisted.

"In my boot I do," she said, "Got a bottle of Jägermeister in my bra. Do you want a bit? You'll have to get it for me."

"Unbelievable…" Matilda muttered.

"Uh…" Hannah faltered. "I don't think getting drunk at a school disco is a good idea."

"You can always take my bra off and then decide afterwards if you want to have a drink?" Steph leant on the wall to talk to her. Hannah stared at her. Apparently, that was all Steph needed to say, and only seconds elapsed between Steph's glib delivery and the pair of them making a beeline for the toilets without a thought for what Matilda was going to do. She didn't have Aki _or_ Steph anymore, and not even Hannah Beckett.

She was beginning to think that school was overrated. These were the kinds of experiences she always thought she was missing out on, not being allowed to attend school for her entire life up until that September, but it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. By the buffet table at the back of the hall, she could see the Doctor and Clara talking quietly to each other, observing the room and trying to eat quite a hefty portion of party rings. She wasn't seriously considering bailing on the actual disco and going to talk to them, was she…?

"Buffet's running low on brains, right?" someone addressed her and made her jump. It was Jakub Kaczmarek.

"Sorry?"

"Because you're dressed as a zombie," he pointed out.

"…Oh, right," she said. Jake never talked to her. "I heard a rumour that they're bringing out chips later."

"Is Aki not here?"

"She couldn't make it."

"And where's Steph got off to?"

"Oh, Steph's _getting_ off. In the present tense. She's in the loo with Hannah and some mini bottles of liquor, apparently."

"You know Michael Carpenter in Year 13?" Jake asked.

"Uh, no."

"Well, his dad owns an offy, he's nicked a load of stock and he's been flogging it in the carpark. It's where Sam got that Schnapps and Steph's got her miniatures," he explained.

"What did you get?" she asked.

"I'm an upstanding citizen," he said, "Didn't get anything."

"Really?" she asked incredulously. She didn't quite believe him.

"No, you're right. Getting shitfaced at an under eighteens school disco is just the way I want to spend my Friday night," he joked, "To be honest, I just don't have any money left. Already had to buy some, uh… recreational herb."

"Oh, sure."

"Which I didn't bring with me. For the record."

"You wanted to be sober for this event?"

"I mean, that's the best way to enjoy these things," he said, looking out at a sea of teenagers doing the Macarena. "Who'm I dressed as?" he challenged when she didn't know what to say. She didn't know why he was talking to her; just because Sam was being told off elsewhere? She squinted at him in the darkness; he was wearing a leather jacket, a t-shirt, and a strange cap.

"Marlon Brando," she said. He was surprised.

"Can't believe you knew that."

"I like old films," she said. Of course, it helped that _The Wild One_ was a key symbol of the 1950s zeitgeist.

"More than just Romero?"

"Romero's a classic. The Oswalds watch a lot of old films."

"Really? Which ones?"

"I guess a lot of Hitchcock."

"Kind of basic."

She laughed, "That's a bold opinion."

"I mean, Hitchcock peaked with _The Lodger_."

" _What_? That's probably the worst thing anyone's ever said."

"Name a better silent film."

" _Nosferatu_."

"Pfft," he scoffed, "Stolen."

"So is _The Lodger_ , it's just Jack the Ripper. Plus, it has a happy ending."

"Do you not like happy endings?"

"I think it ruins the tone."

"So what's Mrs Oswald's favourite Hitchcock?" he asked.

"Clara likes _Rear Window_. The Doctor prefers _The Birds_."

"What about you?"

" _Vertigo_."

"That's a cliché."

"But it doesn't have a happy ending," she pointed out, "That's why I like it. When she falls to her death, it's satisfying."

"Wow. I wouldn't have come over to talk to you if I knew you were so depressing, I would've just gone to do the Macarena with them," he nodded at the crowds, "Why aren't _you_ joining in?"

"I don't know it," she confessed. He looked surprised. "Why are you talking to me, exactly?"

"Steph's not here to tell me to fuck off. And you have the best costume of anybody here. Except maybe Hannah, she went all out as… who's she supposed to be?"

"She's Valentina Tereshkova."

"Who?"

"First woman to fly into space."

"And you just knew that?"

"No, she's had to explain it to everyone she's seen tonight, including me."

"Uh-oh," he said.

"What?"

"It's the cops." She was half-expecting it to actually _be_ the police approaching them, after so many horrible crimes over the last two days, but it wasn't. It was just the Oswalds. They'd run out of food.

"Probably best not to tell them about your 'herb'," she advised. He shushed her. "What's up?" she asked them when they were close enough. The song had changed, it was now _Thriller_ , and yet again people were dancing in uniform.

"We just noticed the distinct absence of Stefani and Hannah, and were wondering where they've got to," said Clara.

"Why does it matter where they are?" Jake asked her.

"Reflects badly on us to let students cop off with each other at school events," said Clara, "So? Where've they gone?"

"Toilets," said Mattie. Jake shot her a disapproving look. "What? They ditched me." Clara left to go and deal with them.

"Snitching on your peers to an old fogey like that? C'mon, Matts, where's your integrity?" the Doctor jibed.

"Well, Steph's pissed me off today. She didn't do her bit for the science thing, in the end, so me and Aki got in trouble with Mr McCloud."

"Uh-huh… and what were you two talking about just now?"

"Jake was saying he thinks Hitchcock went downhill after _The Lodger_."

The Doctor laughed, "Oh really? And what's your opinion on _Blackmail_ , Jakub? First British talkie deserves a look-in, don't you think?"

"It's not as atmospheric as _The Lodger_."

"I mean, I get that, but on the other hand, could you imagine if they'd made _The Lodger_ around twenty years later? Pure noir. I can't get enough chiaroscuro. Would've been an improvement."

"It doesn't work as noir," he argued, "It would have Welles to compete with if it did."

"A Welles fanboy, huh? What's your poison? _A Touch of Evil_? _Citizen Kane_?"

" _Citizen Kane_ is overrated."

"Damn! They should lock you up in a laboratory for testing," said the Doctor, grinning.

"Well – it's empty, isn't it? The whole film. It doesn't have a satisfying end."

"I think that's the point. Charlie didn't have a satisfying life. Sure, he had money, but he didn't have a whole lot else. That's what Rosebud means." Jakub rolled his eyes. "I have the original snow globe from that movie at home somewhere. Got it from an old buddy of mine." Unbeknownst to both Jakub and Matilda, that old buddy had been Orson Welles himself. "I'm digging the Brando vibes, though; can you do the voice?"

"I'm not gonna embarrass myself by trying."

"A shame; if you had that and a motorcycle, you'd be the real deal."

They were interrupted by shouting from the vicinity of the girls' toilets nearby, and very promptly Steph and Hannah burst out as though they'd been attacked. It took all three of them by surprise – what had happened? Clara followed in their wake a few seconds later, but it didn't look like she'd actually been in there to talk to them. Much to Mattie's annoyance, Steph was coming straight toward her.

"Mattie! It was the demon, I swear!"

"There is no… for god's sake…" she groaned.

"Seriously, we were in there, all the lights started flashing on and off, the doors were banging – maybe the toilet is haunted!" Steph exclaimed.

"Something _did_ happen…" said Hannah, looking wholly embarrassed.

"What's all this about a demon?" Clara interrupted loudly, talking over the music. "Would this be anything to do with what you were doing with the washing up bowl the other night, by any chance?"

"You-!?" Steph stammered, "I mean – it was just a stupid game! That's it! I can't even be here! I need to go outside!" She was _very_ flustered and took off for the exit. Hannah followed her. After a moment's hesitation, Jakub left too, to check his sister was okay. That left Mattie alone once again and hanging out with her teachers. But now she had a bone to pick with them.

"It was you, wasn't it?" she asked Clara.

"What do you mean?" Clara pretended to be oblivious.

"You were eavesdropping – _you've_ been doing all the weird stuff. Knocking books off shelves, turning lights on and off," Mattie accused her. She played dumb for a few more moments.

"… _Yeah_ , okay, it was me. I heard Steph's ritual." Mattie shook her head. "Maybe now you'll all think twice about dabbling with things like that. There are plenty of malevolent forces out there who'll take advantage of weird rituals."

"Like you?"

"Y'know, some people _do_ call me the Phantom."

"Hey…" said the Doctor.

"Who calls you that?" Mattie asked in disbelief.

"People do!" Clara protested, "The Shadow does. It's a thing that Ravenwood and I share."

"Clara…" the Doctor interrupted.

"Like our pen name."

" _Coo_ ," she reiterated louder.

"Don't call me that while we're working," Clara said, alarmed.

" _Look_!" she hissed, pointing.

Someone, or rather, some _thing_ , had just entered the school hall. It came in through one of the back doors carrying a strange piece of equipment, but there was no denying what the creature actually was: the Kandyman. The same Kandyman from the crime scene photos, the Kandyman from the pumpkin fame. The Kandyman from Terra Alpha.

"This is bad," said Mattie, "This is a school. That thing is a serial killer and it's in a school! Why is it just here!?"

"It must have… been hired as an entertainer, or something. Don said it has a DBS check and _he_ hired it as a clown, so… maybe?" said Clara uncertainly, "But how would it know where to find us?"

"Maybe it's a coincidence," said the Doctor as the Kandyman got up on stage, "Halloween disco full of kids is just the sort of thing to get my attention. I wouldn't put it past him."

"Then – shit, what should we do?" Clara hissed.

"Alright, um – Mattie, go pull the fire alarm to get everyone out of the building, then make sure you stay outside, keep an eye on the doors, and let us know if anything happens." Mattie nodded and left to do this, the fire alarm on the other side of the room, "You stay here and keep an eye on him. I'm gonna go get the water guns out of the van."

* * *

It was raining heavily once again that night. The windows on Benji's car were steaming up on the inside as he drove towards Turing High as quickly as he could. The ice cream van had been sighted in the vicinity by some patrolling constables when he was already on his way there to see if 'Andy K. Man' really was going to show up at the school twice in a row. It seemed he was, so time was of the essence. Benji didn't know what he was planning but was convinced that whoever was in that costume was responsible for the murders of Dennis Carter, the Jane Doe in the field, and probably Daniel Nelson. Getting him _out_ of a school full of children was Benji's top priority, above discovering what the Oswalds had to do with all this.

He was met with an unexpected sight when he entered the carpark, however; it was full of staff and children, all flooding onto the tarmac. He had to honk his horn to get them to move so he could draw closer to the builder, before the crowd got so thick he eventually gave up and clambered out of the car, hunching his shoulders against the rain again. Over the tops of heads, he spied the ice cream van he'd seen driving away the previous night. Once again he went to find an adult, a member of staff. None of them were the same ones as last night. Closest to the door was a tall red-headed woman with two men by her side, both of them barking borderline incoherent orders at the kids. One telling them to line up, one telling them to get in groups.

"Excuse me, could you tell me what's going on here?" Benji asked the woman because she seemed like the most sensible. She was alarmed.

"Who are you?"

"Detective Sergeant Speyer," he said, taking out his wallet to flash his ID and badge. "I've got a warrant for the arrest of an Andy K. Man. We believe he might be a person of interest in a series of violent crimes, and that he was hired to work here at this disco."

"You mean-? The Candy Man? In the funny suit?"

"Yes, that's him. Could I get your name?"

"It's Sarah, Sarah Pickman. This is Kyle Chapel and Terrance Baxter," she indicted her colleagues. "He's still inside, I think. He just got here when the fire alarm went."

"There's a fire?"

"Probably just a prank," said Chapel.

"Or someone with a spliff in the toilets," added Baxter.

"Right…" said Benji, "Have emergency services been notified?"

"It's an automatic system," said Pickman.

"Who else is still inside the building? Along with this Candy Man?"

"Well…" she looked around, then frowned, "I can't see Clara, or – have either of you seen Clara? Or the Doctor?" Chapel and Baxter shook their heads. "They must still be inside."

"I'll go see what's going on, make sure you keep the kids outside and when the fire brigade show up, tell them to contact the Brighton Police dispatcher for the details on our suspect, alright?" he didn't wait for her answer before hurrying off into the building.

The fire alarm had tripped the sprinklers, and the halls were now soaked. Benji was forced to battle through more wet weather because of this, both indoors and outdoors, trying to find his way to the main hall. It was a challenge trying not to slip in those dark, slicked hallways. He headed towards the music and the strobe lights, both still continuing despite the fire alarm going off, and crashed into the hall. He had barged in on a showdown of sorts. At one end of the room was the Candy Man, that very same costume he had seen yesterday morning in the back room of Carter's Confectionary, and at the other were Clara and the Doctor, dressed in gaudy costumes of their own.

"How nice of you to finally accept my invitations, Doctor," the Candy Man said in a high-pitched, whiny sort of voice, descending the steps at the side of the stage.

"Invitations? That's what you call murdering a string of innocent people?" the Doctor countered.

"I was just having fun," he said.

"Why don't you tell me how you got here, huh? There's a couple hundred lightyears and more than a few centuries between you and I, Kandyman." It was all one word? And what was she talking about?

"Assassinations are a lucrative business for someone of my disposition. It wasn't hard to find a vortex manipulator."

"It never is…" she muttered, "Who rebuilt you? You were melted on Terra Alpha. Nothing more than a metal skeleton."

"An admirer of Helen A opted to rebuild me to Gilbert M's exact specifications, he wanted me to kill his enemies in business. I thought that didn't sound like a lot of fun, so I killed _him_ and went off on my own."

"Seems even the future is overrun with Thatcherites… of course someone rebuilt a thing like you. I guess kitsch was in fashion again." He wasn't happy about that.

"You're very hard to track down, with this habit of changing your face, Doctor. But the arrogance is always the same."

"So they always tell me. I think it's charming."

"Where is your assistant?"

"Ace is safe and sound. You'll never find her. Got a new one now, this is Clara," she introduced, "She might not have Ace's knack for explosives, but she's got one for a whole lot of others."

"Is that a compliment?" Clara asked her unsurely.

"I'll get back to you on that," said the Doctor. "So, then. Here I am. Right where you want me. What're you gonna do? I don't see any big, Fondant Surprise tubes in here."

"I have a mobile fondant dispenser now, Doctor," said the Kandyman, lifting up his arm. Benji was horrified to witness him reaching over and twisting his own hand all the way around, recoiling at the sight. But what had they been talking about earlier? Him being a metal skeleton, melted and rebuilt? Where his hand had been there was now just a hollow tube.

"Uh-oh," said the Doctor, just as a vivid pink liquid came squirting forth towards them. They ducked, as did Benji, to get away from the torrent of whatever-it-was. Even with the sprinklers going on full, the substance bubbled and boiled on the floor of the hall, melting it underfoot.

"Will one of you please tell me what the fuck is going on?" he demanded as Clara pushed over one of the buffet tables, knocking the food to the floor, and they crouched down behind it. He didn't think much of its chances for withstanding whatever the Kandyman was spewing at them.

"What the-!? When did you get here!?" the Doctor gawked at him. Clara, too, hadn't noticed him come in.

"Just now! I've got a warrant for his arrest, in connection with the murders you two just can't stop yourselves getting involved in!"

"Okay, here's the thing – this guy's got a bit of a grudge against me and an old friend of mine, Ace, and he's tracked me down and was killing those people to lure me out and get revenge, that's the headlines," said the Doctor quickly.

"Come out, Doctor!" Kandyman called in his obnoxious trill of a voice, "I know where you are!" He was approaching them slowly.

"Okay, this is bad news if he can spray fondant out of his arm now," said the Doctor.

" _Fondant_?" asked Speyer.

"It's molten candy, okay? Look, he's robot, a crazy robot," she said.

"That's impossible, robots aren't that advanced," said Benji.

"I really don't care if you believe me, I care about stopping this moron from killing a whole school. Cover me, Coo."

"Cover-? Where are you going!?"

"I've got some gadgets in the van."

"Do you have the keys?"

"Got my screwdriver!" she said, jumping to her feet. Clara peered over the table, the Kandyman almost on them. As the Doctor ran for the doors out, the Kandyman raised his arm and sprayed another torrent of molten candy. To Benji's shock, Clara held up a hand towards the candy and it appeared to be blasted out of the way of the fleeing Doctor as if by an unseen force. The Kandyman was forced to retreat from his own weaponry. The Doctor made it through the doors and left.

"You're seriously telling me that's a robot?" Benji asked Clara.

"Yes, it's a robot, it's an executioner from a human colony in the future," she said.

"It's _what_?"

"Look, this is a lot to dump on somebody at once at a very intense time, and no offence, but you're in the police so I basically don't trust you whatsoever."

"I take some offence to that," he said.

"Come out now, children!" the Kandyman called. Another wave of fondant came, straight for the plastic table. As predicted, it melted through and their cover was ruined.

"Run, run!" Clara ordered, taking off towards the doors.

"Where to!? We can't go outside where all the kids are!" he argued. More fondant was shot at them, and again Clara held up her hand and it bounded off the very air as if she had a forcefield.

"This way, this way," she said, turning right, the opposite direction to the exterior when they escaped from the hall. The good thing about being a lumbering robot made of sweets was that the Kandyman wasn't the fastest foe, which gave them enough time to duck into the last door in the corridor. It was a science room with tall desks big enough to block what was behind them from view. Clara dragged Benji behind the furthest one to wait for the Doctor to return. "How exactly did you know he would be here?"

"I saw him here yesterday."

"And you make a habit of lurking around schools?"

" _No_ , my daughter goes to school here, she's in Year 7. Katie Fuentes. She says you're her favourite teacher."

"Really? That's nice. She's very bright, for what it's worth. You should be proud."

"I am, thanks…" he said awkwardly.

"So? What's the rest of your story?"

"I happened to be here collecting her from the disco, and I saw this 'Kandyman' driving away in an ice cream van. I recognised it from the crime scene photos, thought it was just a bloke in a costume."

"He's got a lot of people duped that way, I wouldn't worry about it," said Clara quietly.

"Come out and play with me!" the Kandyman called loudly from outside the room. The sprinklers stopped.

"Why were you at all the crime scenes if that thing doesn't know who you are?"

"Coincidence," she whispered, "The Doctor said he's doing sweet-themed murders. Ice cream van, sweet shop owner, pumpkin farm – all themed. I just happened to be in the vicinity because I was driving Aki and Steph home, like I told you. By the way, you can't really tell the police about this, like, at all."

"I have crimes I need to solve," he hissed.

"If we dispatch the murderer, then it won't-" she was cut off by the Kandyman pushing the door to the classroom open.

"I can smell you in here, children," said the Kandyman. Clara rolled her eyes. There was no way he could smell them; he didn't have a nose.

"What's your wife planning on doing, exactly?" Benji lowered his voice as much as he could.

"Nothing substantial, she's got a water gun with some lemonade in it, apparently that'll stick him to the floor. Not that that'll help us when he has that fuck-off candy cannon in his arm."

"…You say I can't tell the police about this?"

"Yes, under no conditions," she snapped. The Kandyman could definitely hear them, and walked through the middle of the desks, checking them all one by one.

"Well, I might have one or two things that I can't tell the police about myself," he said.

"Like what?" she asked. He didn't wait to explain. Instead, he stood up and gave away their hiding place, Clara cursing behind him.

"Are you ready to play with the Kandyman?"

"Are you programmed to sound like a paedo, or what?" Clara quipped.

"I like to have fun with people of all ages, not just children."

"Totally still sounds like something a paedo would say, mate." The Kandyman was so annoyed by that that he lifted his 'candy-cannon' again and pointed it directly at Benji. But like Clara Oswald and the Kandyman himself, Benji Speyer had some tricks up his sleeve. Before the Kandyman even knew what hit him, Benji held up both of his hands and hoped that what he was about to do would work for once.

It did.

Blasts of bright green energy burst out of his palms, straight for the Kandyman's torso. Clara stood up to witness this, the concentrated energy beams pulverising the Kandyman all the way through. It took a _lot_ for Benji to do that, and he dropped his arms after just a few seconds. But it had done the job. A circular hole had been burned through the Kandyman's innards, and sure enough, they were metallic and tubular rather than blood and guts. He really was a robot. Destroyed beyond repair, he let out a high-pitched wail and there was a noise like a small explosion. His head began to smoke, and he went toppling backwards, smashing apart on the floor in the middle of the science classroom.

Clara stared at the Kandyman, then at Benji, then back at the Kandyman. Then she pointed at him.

"Oh my god," she said, "You're a Manifest. You're a Manifest and your eyes didn't turn silver – which means you aren't just a Manifest, you're unregistered."

"…Yeah. Maybe a bit. And I know you are, too. You did something when he was trying to shoot us."

"Telekinesis," she said stiffly.

"Manifests can't be teachers," he said.

"They can't join the police, either."

Someone kicked the door down. It was the Doctor, two water guns bundled in her arms. She stopped to take in the scene when she saw the smouldering wreck of the Kandyman on the floor.

"…What did I miss?" she asked.

"The detective here is an unregistered Manifest who can shoot energy beams out of his hands," Clara said, "Killed the Kandyman dead."

"Mm, I doubt he's dead, probably has a black box in there somewhere… we'd better see what your sister makes of him. She's the AI expert," said the Doctor.

"Sorry, but what's actually happening, hm? Who are you?" Benji implored.

Clara and the Doctor exchanged a look with each other.

"We can't trust him, Coo. He's a cop."

"But he won't be if news that he's a Manifest gets out," said Clara.

"Are you blackmailing me? A police officer?" Benji demanded.

"It's not blackmail," she said, "It's mutually assured destruction. My job's gone too if anyone finds out I'm a Manifest, or that she's…" she nodded at her wife.

"She's what, exactly?"

"Ugh, _fine_. But this is a bad idea," said the Doctor, then she turned to Benji, "I'm an alien, alright?"

"Isn't the costume a bit on the nose, in that case? An alien and telekinetic Carrie?" he asked.

"It was funny! I'm an alien from a planet billions of lightyears away, and also a time traveller. But I don't think now is the time for this. We've got fire engines waiting outside and this thing in here. Plus, how do we explain the mess of candy in the hall?"

"…I know," Clara put her hands together, "We just call the TARDIS now, dump the Kandyman on there, then use it to drop ourselves outside about five minutes ago, join everyone out there just after you ran back in _here_ , and give ourselves alibis. Helix can wipe all the cameras remotely."

"So we're taking this guy on the TARDIS now? Great, that's just great. A cop, on my TARDIS…"

"No, he should go out the front _now_ to liaise with the fire department. They can just write it off as a strange, unexplained event. God knows we did that with the trees. If it comes down to it, we can get an executive order sent down from UNIT. Osgood won't mind helping us out if we already stopped the murderer," Clara said quickly.

Benji did not entirely understand this plan or anything they'd told him, in fact, but apparently, the first step was that he was going to have to go back outside and tell the fire brigade his suspect was gone so they could go in to investigate the source of the fire. Feeling a little bit shell-shocked from his encounter, he did just this, though he almost returned to the classroom when he heard a bizarre thrumming, or maybe vworping, noise from within. He turned to look back at the door, slowly realising exactly how little they'd explained to him. But for whatever reason, he found himself trusting them.

He left the building and found the fire brigade looking thoroughly pissed off and stuck outside with two engines between them, staff and kids still milling about in the carpark. They were slightly more organised than when he'd entered the school, but not much.

"Detective?" asked the closest fireman, "What's going on?"

"Uh…" he faltered. He didn't know what to say. "…A suspect vehicle has been traced to this school, potentially belonging to a violent criminal. I was conducting a search for this suspect."

"Oh my god," Pickman gasped, "Did you find them?"

"I… can't disclose those sorts of details, sorry. Ongoing case. School's clear for the fire alarm to be investigated, though," he said awkwardly. The fire brigade pushed past him and left him standing like a lemon in front of the teachers. "I think you should cut the disco short. Get the kids home safe tonight."

"You didn't find the criminal!?" Pickman gasped _again_.

"Everything is under control," he assured her, "I just have to go now. To talk to some people. Police people." He was normally so curt and professional, and now he could barely get a word out. He steeled himself to ignore their questions, which came in droves and pushed back through the crowds to get to his car. He had Clara Oswald's phone number and address from talking to her yesterday as a witness so decided to take his leave and get the details later on. Honking the horn to get the teenagers to move, he drove slowly out of the carpark, barely able to register everything that had happened.

Benji pulled out of the Turing High carpark not knowing where he should go. He took out a packet of cigarettes from his jacket, steering through the rain with one hand, and pulled one out with his teeth. He ran into trouble trying to find his lighter though, unable to remember what pocket he'd put it in.

"Need a light?" Someone drenched in blood sat up from the backseat of his car and he shouted and swerved, almost going careening straight into oncoming traffic. "Bloody hell!" It was Clara.

"What are you doing!?" he demanded, managing to right the car, dropping his cigarette in the process.

"Well I had to _hide_. I can't be seen getting into a car with a police officer, I'll lose the respect of the kids," she said, "I thought we could go for a coffee."

"A-!? Are you insane? What's going on?"

"I'll tell you over coffee." Over the back of the seat, she held out a silver cigarette lighter towards him. He picked up his cigarette and she lit it for him while he tried to drive.

"Thanks…" he muttered.

"Could I just bum one of them, actually?" she asked.

"Sure…" he handed her the pack, "How did you get into my car?"

"I can walk through walls."

"Course you can walk through walls… why wouldn't you be able to walk through bloody walls… where's your wife gone?"

"Home. It's been about half an hour."

"It's-?"

"Time travel. The Doctor did tell you she's a time traveller," she said, which he didn't think was much of an explanation. She took a drag on the cigarette but coughed and flinched. "What _are_ these?"

"L&B Blues," he said.

"Eurgh, if you're smoking L&Bs you might as well have roll-ups."

"And what do you smoke, exactly?"

"Marlboro Reds. Didn't take any with me to the school disco, though, but I do have some nicotine mints."

"Are you quitting?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"What day of the week it is, I suppose," she said. Despite her dislike of Lambert & Butlers, she kept smoking it. "My wife hates it."

"Your time travelling, alien wife?"

"Yes, in fact. Do you believe me?"

"For some reason… I mean, aliens are always coming here, aren't they? Well, they go to London. They don't really go to Brighton."

"What about the trees?" Clara challenged.

"That was… was that aliens?"

"Of course it was aliens, alien trees."

"And you were involved in it, were you?"

"I stopped it by ripping out the tree heart. It was really far underground, we had to go through the tube tunnels. And you know last month, when it broke that Prometheus was manufacturing new Manifests?"

"Yeah…?"

"I was there too; I saw him die."

"He had a heart attack."

"Yeah, because he injected himself with an untested Manifest serum and his heart exploded. Also, I've met your great-great-grandfather, or whatever. Archie Speyer. We ran into him in 1964, trying to track down a rival mobster," she said. It was almost too much to cope with. He pulled into a fast-food drive-thru, barely registering what chain it was a part of, and tried to put it all out of his mind until he'd ordered a coffee from the window. Clara got the same thing and then, still in her Carrie get-up, clambered into the front seat to sit next to him. "Funny thing about that, it turned out that Prometheus was paying off the police. Covering up some strange murders."

"…Whose murders?" he asked carefully.

"Dexter Ward, in Brighton."

"Didn't cross my desk."

"Do you know a police constable with an acid burn on his face?"

"Yes. PC Trent."

"He got that burn from a Manifest he was trying to unlawfully arrest. I stepped in, and he smacked me over the head with a baton."

"He'd remember that. He says he doesn't know how he got the burn on his face. He's been on leave ever since."

Clara lowered her voice, "He doesn't remember because we have access to a drug. It's called Retcon. Selective amnesia. Makes you forget anything we don't want you to know." Benji clenched his jaw. "As someone who can walk through walls, it would be very easy for me to get into your house and slip some in your coffee. You'd never even notice. You live at 78, Wilcox Road, don't you?" He still didn't say anything. "You're listed as Katie's second emergency contact." Her mother was the first.

"You're threatening a police officer, Mrs Oswald."

"Mm, you could say that." The restaurant attendant handed two coffee cups through the window towards them, complimenting Clara's costume as she did. Clara held out one of the cups to Benji.

"I can't get a read on you. What do you want?"

"I want to keep my family safe," she said seriously. "I'm willing to wipe your memory of all of this if that's what I need to do. But whether I need to or not is down to you. Because I'll quite happily keep your secret. I won't tell anyone you're a Manifest. You won't tell anyone _I'm_ a Manifest or notify any relevant authorities about the Doctor's whereabouts."

"What do you mean? People are looking for her?" Benji parked up at the side of the closest road, putting on the handbrake.

"People are always looking for the Doctor, she's desirable. In more ways than like… her face. The Kandyman came back to life and crossed the galaxy just for the chance of meeting her again. But like I said, it's mutually assured destruction for us. Except, you'd lose your job and get a court date, and we'd just disappear into thin air."

"And what am I supposed to say to the station DCI about chasing a suspect into a school who vanished? What am I meant to do about being unable to arrest your killer robot for these crimes? To get justice for the murder victims?"

"We put in a call with the leader of UNIT."

"You called the leader of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce?"

"Yes, the case is getting reassigned. They'll deal with it, as unexplained phenomena. To be fair, it is technically in their wheelhouse and not yours."

"And yet I managed to track your Kandyman down."

"And blow him up. Thanks for that, by the way; the Doctor didn't have a plan beyond squirting it with pop. We wiped the CCTV so your secret's safe, as is mine."

"So I'm just meant to trust you? To believe you?"

"You don't have much of a choice. Feel free to give us a bell if you get more spooky cases, though. Might be able to help. We're good friends with the Lightning Girl."

"…Right. Yep. Why wouldn't you be friends with the Lightning Girl…" Clara opened the passenger side door. "Where are you going?"

"My lift's here," she said, pointing out of the windshield. The glass rippled with rainwater, and he had to squint to see what was out there.

"Is that a police box? From the 1960s?"

"The TARDIS," Clara said, getting out of the car and into the rain. She held up her hand and the rain diverted around her, saving her from getting wet. "Time machine. How I got into your car. We took the Kandyman onto the TARDIS and came back just before we left."

"You fit that thing in there?"

"It's bigger on the inside," she said. He frowned. She laughed. "We're good, then? We've got a deal?"

"I don't have a choice."

"No, you don't… Anyway. Suppose I'll see you for parents' evening in a few months, to check how Katie's getting on. Thanks for the coffee and the cigarette, even if it is an L&B." She flicked the stub onto the rainy pavement and sipped her coffee.

"Yeah. I suppose so." Clara turned to leave, heading towards the police box.

"And, um," she turned back, "Happy Halloween."

"…Happy Halloween…" he mumbled. She smiled and went off across the street.

When she entered the phone box she waved over her shoulder one last time. Not even his encounter with the Kandyman could prepare Benji for what happened next. He heard that strange thrumming noise again, the blue box began to fade in and out of existence, the light on top of it flashing, until it had completely dematerialised.

It was the weirdest Halloween of Benji Speyer's life.

 **AN: Again, sorry this is so late! Also: Benji is currently planned to be a small recurring character because I thought them having a police contact would be useful; he won't blackmail them or become and antagonist.**


	37. The Twilight Zone - Prologue

_The Twilight Zone_

 _Prologue_

A cacophonous explosion tore through the caves far beneath the city, the rubble pulled into a singularity and condensed until it ceases to exist under the interminable weight of itself.

The Doctor cackled with delight. She had finally done it, finally broken through into a large cavern after weeks of fruitless, filthy tunnelling. Working around veins of geothermal piping which, ordinarily, she wouldn't think twice about destroying to get what she wanted, had become so tedious she almost gave up. She _would_ have given up if her latest excavation hadn't given her such wonderful results.

It was a mysterious cave full of fresh air, so she wouldn't have to do battle with the diving suit anymore if she only remained in the undersea lair. A bounty of fossilised creatures lay at her feet. Ribs, teeth, skulls, spines; everything she needed to conduct her experiments. It was almost funny how little the native population knew about their own home, how they hadn't seen to take advantage of the bones and graves hundreds of years before she had heard rumours of ancient monsters stalking the silver seas.

"Is this it, Doctor?" asked her associate timidly.

"Did I say you could speak to me?" They silenced. "I thought not. Do not address me unless I address you first. But yes. This _is_ it. Now, go fetch my things. I need to begin my analysis. I've wasted enough time here already crawling through these tunnels."

"The stability of the volcano is paramount to-"

"You are answering a question I haven't asked. And why are you still standing here? I told you to go, so _go_ ," she snapped. Emix jumped out of their skin.

"Yes, Doctor…" They crawled away on their tentacles back out of the cave, sliding into the water again. The Doctor put her hands on her hips to examine the cave more thoroughly, with only a head torch for illumination.

It really was a glorious sight to behold.


	38. The Twilight Zone - Chapter 1

_The Twilight Zone_

 _1_

"I _promise_ , Coo," the Doctor said as she skittered around the TARDIS console flicking switches and pulling levers, "This is a trip you won't regret. Xetos is _beautiful_ ; it's got crystal clear oceans for miles around; a metropolis built into a living, breathing tropical reef; barnacles the size of dinner plates; and critters so whacky they wouldn't make the final cut in a _Sponge-Bob_ movie." Clara gripped the railings at the edge of the console room's platform as the central column thrummed up and down, trying to keep her balance as they span wildly through the time vortex.

Truthfully, she was very wary of going to an ocean world with the Doctor; the memory of Eleven drowning in the Irish Sea became fresh in her mind every time she was confronted with choppy waters, and she sometimes had bad dreams about the Twelfth Doctor sinking beneath the grey waves and slipping away from her forever. It had taken a lot of convincing not only to get Clara to agree to this specific destination but on any destination at all. But the Doctor's begging made her think about their fateful trip to Yellowstone the previous summer, that had ended in years of bitter, brewing resentment imploding just before the Doctor had disappeared for six sorry weeks. It was part of their agreement – their compromise – that they would still take trips in the TARDIS on occasion, despite it being entrusted to Jenny and her gaudy redesigns, so Clara was obliged to agree. Especially when the Doctor went on her spiel about what a picturesque and wonderful planet she had in mind with intelligent fish-people and urbanised underwater cities with coral skyscrapers, houses made of enormous and repurposed shells, friendly crustaceans the size of dogs, a glistening and vibrant horizon illuminated by perpetual moonlight from above… it did sound like the perfect destination for her birthday trip. She had turned seventy-eight that morning.

The ship landed with a sharp jerk and Clara was torn from her thoughts, knees buckling as the thrumming stopped.

"It's like nothing you've ever seen," the Doctor continued, grinning and slamming down one final lever to keep them grounded. The TARDIS silenced. "Go ahead," she smiled and indicated the door.

"What about the water?"

"The hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through that door, let alone a measly ocean," she said, "There'll be time to get the 'proper equipment' later, but you need to see the skyline from inside the water to appreciate it. Trust me, it's incredible." And Clara did trust her, and upon landing began to feel that old itch of excitement whenever the TARDIS landed somewhere new, somewhere she hadn't seen, somewhere the Doctor was so happy to be showing her. It always made her realise she was nowhere near as jaded with time travel as she sometimes feared.

Clara ran to the doors with all the passion of someone on their first trip to an alien world, let alone tens of thousands of worlds down the line. She pushed them open with no resistance from the water, and was met with… rain.

"The colours, the architecture, the volcano – it's like the whole city just _grew_ out of the seabed, you have to see it to…" the Doctor continued her description as she came to join Clara in observing this allegedly astonishing city, but she too found herself besieged by a violent rainstorm as soon as she stepped out of the ship. Wind lashed around them and the smell of salt was thick in the air. They were in a street, that was clear enough, with people milling around, filthy and slouched down next to various bright lights and holographic signs. It was the exact opposite of everything the Doctor had described; it was industrial and cold, there were no signs of the sea aside from the sleek coating of water and the occasional sprout of algae covering all the visible surfaces. "This can't be right…" she grumbled, disappearing back into the TARDIS. Clara used her telekinesis in place of an umbrella – because what good would an umbrella have been underwater, where she thought they were going? – to keep the worst of the rain off her and ventured further out.

The closest holographic sign was being projected onto a wall directly above someone who appeared to be homeless and half-asleep, cold and dirty but with no place else to be. It read 'Aegean Industries' in a crystal-clear corporate logo, flickering every now and then and casting blue light onto the raindrops that passed through it. The hologram disappeared momentarily, quickly replaced by a differing one with the caption 'Sponsored By…' lingering above it. The new logo was for 'Milky Way Shakes – A fresh taste of home' with the fine-print disclaimer beneath declaring that Milky Way Shakes were 100% artificial and free of all dairy products and potential allergens. It flashed for around ten seconds and was promptly supplanted by the familiar 'Aegean Industries' screen again.

"Hey, you," the person she thought was passed out on the ground underneath the ad groaned at her. She looked at them expectantly. "Do you have any Glow?"

"Any what?"

"Glow," the repeated hoarsely.

"…No, sorry," she apologised, "I'll, uh, let you know if I come into any, though?" They didn't say anything else to her, only closed their eyes and leant back against the cold wall, seemingly indifferent to chilly air and the bad weather. Or maybe just used to it.

Behind Clara, the Doctor returned, and the TARDIS door closed behind her. With her, she now had the old umbrella she'd reclaimed from Osgood, with its question mark shaped handle, which she opened to protect against the rain.

"It's going to get blown inside-out," Clara warned her.

"This? Nah. It's made of tungsten. Perfectly capable of withstanding a little breeze." It was definitely more than 'a little breeze', Clara thought.

"Hey, there," the same person seemingly lolling in and out of consciousness was roused again by the presence of the Doctor, a newcomer, "Do you have any Glow?" they asked the same question. The Doctor frowned and came to join Clara, holding the umbrella over her head as well (though she didn't need it.)

"'Fraid not. Don't even know what that is," she admitted.

"The only thing that makes life bearable," they muttered, then crossed their arms and turned away, shutting their eyes once again. The hologram logo flashed and changed to a gigantic image of a half-naked woman; it was a borderline incomprehensible plug for some sort of virtual reality chatline, or maybe an escort service, it wasn't exactly clear just how far these women would go or whether there was even a real person on the other end of the line. Again though, the ad was of a human, not one of the aquatic denizens the Doctor had promised the planet was inhabited by.

"The TARDIS says we're in the right place, but…"

"Looks like a human colony to me," said Clara, taking a few steps back from the stranger curled up on the floor. The Doctor looked up at the sky, squinting. There were a lot of clouds but that didn't mean Clara wasn't alarmed at the scale of the gargantuan celestial body suspended above them. It was pearly white and obscured about half of the black sky, the other half lit up only by a pinprick-sized star. "What's _that_?" she asked.

"It's just a planet," said the Doctor amused.

"But – it's in the sky."

"Well, we're _technically_ not on a planet ourselves, Xetos is a moon," she said, "That's Pheran, it's a gas giant about twice the size of Jupiter. But it means we really _are_ in _exactly_ the right place, Xetos is tidally locked with Pheran so you're always looking at it if you're on this side of the planet. Y'know, just like how Earth's moon always faces the same way."

"I suppose…" said Clara, who had developed a habit of zoning out when the Doctor tried to explain this or that to her about planets and moons and stars and galaxies. She thought they were pretty and appreciated being able to see and visit them in all shapes and sizes, but as far as the science behind something being 'tidally locked', for instance, was concerned, she just sort of dropped off.

"I don't like this," said the Doctor, "Something stinks, and it's not the sea. Well, not _only_ the sea." The stranger sleeping on the floor wasn't the only one they passed as they began to walk. It quickly became clear that there were many people in the same position, lying on the ground looking sick and oppressed in the horrid weather.

"What were you doing when you were last here, then?" Clara asked, trying to distract herself. She wanted to do something to help but didn't have any money or food – or even Glow, whatever that was.

"Just visiting," she said cryptically. She was always 'just visiting.'

"Who with?"

"No one, actually; I was flying solo. I helped them out with an alien invasion. This Rutan warship wanted to use Xetos as a home base to mine Pheran for resources – it was a whole thing. They had a hydrogen extractor big enough to strip it of at least half of its mass. Anyway, I got them to leave."

"How'd you manage that?"

"Look at that vending machine," said the Doctor, stopping. Clara thought she was trying to change the subject and maybe she'd done something unscrupulous during her last visit to the distant moon, but it was a genuine interjection. Shoved against the wall of a narrow street with low buildings, all made of the same dull, grey metal and shining with rain and unpleasant grime, was a pristine vending machine with people clustering around it. Upon closer inspection, however, it wasn't the vending machine that people were so interested in, but someone stood next to it. This was what Clara noticed at least; the Doctor had made a different observation. "Everything else here is dirty, but that thing's in perfect working order."

"'This vending machine is brought to you by Cosnic,'" Clara read a message emblazoned on top of it. The 'this vending machine is brought to you by' part was made out of metal, while the logo of the company was a hologram. Presumably, this was so it could be switched out for a different brand or product at a moment's notice. It took Clara only a few more seconds to realise that 'Cosnic' was a cigarette brand. That was all the push she needed and fumbled to find where she'd put her old sonic screwdriver that day; it was stuck precariously in the back pocket of her jeans, where it was liable to fall out at any moment.

"C'mon, Coo," the Doctor implored.

"I'm not passing up the opportunity to smoke space cigarettes," she said, extending the screwdriver. It didn't light up when she pressed the button; she had to hit it against her palm a few times to get it to start.

"Why not take this as an opportunity to finally quit?" Clara ignored her and sonicked the vending machine interface with the green and gold screwdriver, but there was a brief hiccup during the process. And of course, the Doctor wouldn't use her new, improved, and fully working screwdriver to fix it. The vending machine took it upon itself to start spitting out cigarette packs, which were made of very thin metal, at an alarming rate. Clara stepped out of the way as slum-goers began to approach.

"Those things are supposed to be hack-proof," said a woman, emerging from a shadowy doorway nearby. The doorway was to a house, the door itself jammed open, and Clara saw a few more people sitting around inside. They were either sleeping, or worse. It looked like some kind of drug den.

"Yeah, well, must have malfunctioned," said Clara unconvincingly, stooping to pick up just one pack.

"You're not taking them all?" the woman asked her.

"No, she is not," said the Doctor firmly.

"…I'm not allowed," said Clara to the stranger. The woman studied her, then shrugged and bent down to scoop quite a few of the cigarette packs into her arms. Then she kicked them out into the street towards the others.

"Nobody here can afford things from the vending machines," she said.

"Do any of them have food in, or just cigarettes?" asked the Doctor.

"That one has Brew in it," the woman indicated another machine against a nearby wall.

"What's that?" the Doctor asked.

"It's caffeinated," she said, indifferent. Was it an energy drink? A soda? Some sort of coffee? It wasn't apparent by looking at the machine. "You two don't look like you're from around here."

"We're not," said the Doctor as Clara tried to prise open the metal cigarette case. "Oh, for – give it to me, I'll do it." The Doctor took it from her and easily slid the top open with one hand, handing it back as she shook her head. "It'll light automatically when it detects the oxygen." It did just that, and to Clara's astonishment, the smoke was a vivid purple. "These things are horrible, you know. They might not contain any tar, but they put dye in there to make it that colour. You don't want to inhale dye."

"I'll be fine," said Clara, taking a drag. The Doctor shook her head. Clara paused to think. "I mean, it's no Marlboro."

"And _there's_ the famous brand loyalty Big Tobacco depend on. You're just putting money in their pocket."

"Whose pocket? I stole these," said Clara.

"Mm, well. I suppose that's your only redeeming quality," she said begrudgingly while Clara smoked her purple cancer stick.

"Who are you?" the stranger interrupted them, "We don't get visitors to Aegean-4. Except for brand ambassadors, but you don't talk like brand ambassadors."

"We're not. I'm the Doctor, this is Clara," she introduced them.

"I'm Regan. Is either of you interested in Glow? A thank you for the trick with the vending machine."

"What is that?" Clara asked quickly, "What's Glow?"

"Wow," said Regan, "You really _are_ new. Glow is the latest pharmaceutical development designed to alleviate the Blues."

"The Blues?" asked the Doctor.

"So it's an antidepressant?" Clara said.

"No, _the_ Blues," she reiterated, "What do you think is wrong with everyone here? They all have the Blues. Glow is the only thing that helps." The people were all in state of lethargy, many of them slumped on the ground while those who were standing swooned from side to side, barely able to keep their balance. "All the workers get the Blues."

"These people are workers? They're employed? To do what?" the Doctor stared around at them all.

"Do you want any Glow, or not?" she reiterated, getting colder the longer the exchange continued.

"Get that shit out of here," an interloper snapped at Regan, making Clara jump because they'd been approached from behind. This newcomer was another woman, but she was the least haggard person they'd seen so far. She stood out by the fact she was wearing a white jacket with a red cross on the sleeve – a medical worker of some sort. "You don't need to get newcomers hooked on that stuff." Regan turned sour and spat on the floor at the medic's feet, then took her haul of cigarettes and skulked away. "Did you do this to the vending machine?" she asked Clara sternly.

"I, um… it was an accident," said Clara, unable to look innocent with a bright purple cigarette in her hand. The medic shook her head.

"Well. Better they smoke those than take more Glow. Are you really new?"

"Yes, and we have a lot of questions," said the Doctor seriously.

"Do you have any medical training?"

"I'm a doctor," she said. Clara scoffed. "I _am_ a doctor, the University of Glasgow said so."

"Are you from Earth?" the medic was surprised.

"No, but I've lived there for a long time. _She's_ from Earth," the Doctor indicated Clara.

"If you're a doctor, you can help me. I'm the only medical personnel assigned to the dock workers, which is most of the people here," she began to walk away, and they followed automatically since she was the only person actually giving them information. "There used to be more, but they were cut. They wanted to cut me, too."

"Why didn't they?" asked the Doctor.

"Because I was willing to take a pretty huge pay deduction. I couldn't abandon the people here; they'd be lost without me. Half of them believe the Glow peddlers' story about 'the Blues.'"

"You're saying these people aren't ill?"

"Oh, they're definitely ill. It's decompression sickness. They're divers, and their hours have been increased and the safety rules have been reduced," she explained, "They do maintenance on the turbines. Xetians aren't permitted to be employed by Aegean Industries."

"Why?"

"Insurance premiums," she said bluntly. She was leading them somewhere, through metal, mass-produced slums and sick, sleeping people, all out there in the wind and the rain. It was like they'd landed in an epidemic, but decompression sickness was far from contagious.

"If the whole city is owned by one company, why don't they unionise?" asked Clara, the Doctor nodding in agreement. "Dockworkers are, like, the original trade unionists."

"Oh, they've tried; there was a movement growing in Homer's – that's a bar – but the Aegeans got wind of it and sent their entourage of mercs down to the rim to put a stop to it. Everyone in there had their contracts torn up. After that, everybody else has been too scared to speak out," she explained. "A few people even died."

"Whaddaya know," said the Doctor, "Pinkertons in space… But," she cleared her throat, "If the workers here are all divers with the bends, you must have a way to treat them that isn't this 'Glow' stuff? Don't you have a hyperbaric chamber? Oxygen dispensaries?"

"We've got one chamber, and it's broken. Doesn't hold the pressure, and it can only treat one person at a time. We used to have more, but they were cut. Maintenance costs were too high, and they needed specialist personnel to fix them. I've done the best I can with an old manual – I'm Persephone, by the way." She turned as she walked in front of them and held out her hand, which the Doctor shook.

"Nice to meet you," she said.

"The decompression sickness is the least of my problems if they don't stop taking Glow, though," she resumed, keeping up her speed, "It would help if I knew what it was or where it came from. And the health problems are bullshit." The rain was threatening to put out Clara's cigarette.

"How so?" asked the Doctor.

"They're too vague. Hair loss, skin atrophy, bleeding gums. I saw someone with cataracts. He died a week later, even without taking any more of it. People are handing over what little wages they've got to people like Regan and whoever it is she works for… but I've got some samples. Maybe you'll be able to make more sense of it than me?" she said hopefully, glancing back over her shoulder. The Doctor was about to answer in the affirmative, that she was more than happy to take a look at this 'Glow' and see what was causing the strange array of symptoms Persephone had described when she was cut off by a nearby commotion.

Persephone had led them further out than they had landed the TARDIS and was approaching another identical, metal building, but this one with a holographic red cross flickering like a sign above it denoting it as a medical facility. While the Doctor couldn't wait to get a look at the Glow samples Persephone claimed to possess, the sound of a large crowd shouting made Persephone veer away from the building to investigate. Clara and the Doctor still followed, crossing an empty square with a few lonely vending machines in it – also in pristine condition compared to everything else – and slipped through an alleyway to get to the very edge of Aegean-4. The city itself was built on a large disc, suspended over a choppy, black ocean Clara could now see in the gloomy distance; the waves were larger than any she had ever witnessed, but the city rose and sank with the tide.

Crowds were gathered around a narrow pier and were shouting at some figures climbing out of a docked submarine. Not everyone was human, either; there were two people there wearing suits with fishbowl helmets filled with fluid. They also had eight limbs, two arms and six legs, though they all resembled tentacles tightly clad in the outfits.

"What are they?" Clara asked the Doctor.

"Xetians," she explained, "They're intelligent cephalopods, they need suits to breathe the oxygen. Just like we'd need a diving suit… what's going on?"

"More protests," said Persephone. She went closer, so they did as well, and heard the two xetians shouting accusations of murder at the people leaving the sub. _They_ were a pair of identical, young men – clearly twins – wearing elaborate, silver diving suits, smiling and talking to one another like they couldn't even hear the people heckling them. They motioned to some other divers traipsing behind them, _not_ in gaudy costumes, and the divers hauled an enormous mass out of the dark water.

"Bloody hell," said Clara. To her, it looked like a gigantic eel, at least fifteen feet long, with bioluminescent colouring on its shiny, slimy skin. It had a segmented, translucent shell running across the length of its back as well as four strange antennae at the end she had to assume was the head. It was also, quite obviously, dead. She counted at least three harpoons sticking out of its body, glowing liquid oozing out from the missiles.

"What the heck!?" the Doctor was enraged, "You can't do that! That's a sqwill!" But still, they were oblivious. Some of the protestors, including the xetians, glanced back and noticed them.

"They do this every week," said Persephone, clearly also disgusted.

"They hunt _sqwills_? They're protected, there are laws," said the Doctor.

"What are they?" asked Clara.

"They're just filter feeders," she said, "But they're important to the ecosystem here, it's against intergalactic law to hunt them because the Shadow Proclamation categorises them as V-Class organisms. And you say they do this every week? On a moon this size there can't be more than a handful of sqwill pods."

"Why do you think the xetians are up here protesting?" said Persephone, "That's Blane and Pax Aegean, they operate Aegean-4. It's their family who owns the entire company."

"Where are they taking it?" asked the Doctor.

"To the Lighthouse," said Persephone.

"Pardon?" asked Clara.

"Ignore her, she's an English teacher," the Doctor brushed Clara off, "What's the Lighthouse?"

"That, over there," Persephone pointed out a structure that was quite hard to see without having it pointed out, ironically enough. A large tower loomed over the city from dead in the centre, piercing its heart like a knife.

"Doesn't have any lights on it," said the Doctor.

"The city doubles as a spaceport, it sends out all the necessary signals for crafts," said Persephone.

"And they're going to carry that thing all the way over there?" asked Clara incredulously.

"They have a private dock underneath the Lighthouse, I suppose their submarine must have malfunctioned and they needed to make an emergency stop at the outer rim."

"That does it," said the Doctor, marching towards them with Clara in tow. Not everyone in the crowd was focused on the sqwill, others were yelling abuse to do with longer working hours, less job security, changes to their healthcare policies and the epidemic of 'the Blues' circulating. But the Aegean brothers acted as though they couldn't hear a thing. They were just laughing and chatting to each other while a small, anxious-looking man holding holographic device and muttering followed them around. The closer they got though, they realised that they couldn't hear what the divers or the brothers were saying, either. "Give me that," the Doctor took Clara's purple cigarette right out of her hand and flicked it as though trying to put it out. It hit a forcefield that was otherwise completely invisible, a glistening surface appearing in the air where the cigarette bounced off and fell to the damp ground, going out. "Cowards, they can't hear a thing anybody is saying with a forcefield like that up." Clara was still disappointed by the loss of her cigarette.

"I mean, I can barely hear a thing over the storm regardless of a forcefield," she said, huddling underneath the umbrella. Then she noticed something. "Hold on, what's-?" It looked like a glowing lump of coral hanging from the belt of one of the faceless divers, armed with harpoon guns and accompanying the brothers. She didn't get the opportunity to point out what she had seen to the Doctor though, because the protestors grew dangerously rowdy. Specifically, the xetians.

"A forcefield won't stop this," one of them said, voice audible through a speaker rigged to the suit they were wearing. They lifted an object in one of their hands, which had only two thin fingers and a very long, strange thumb, holding an unusual sphere within. It was an electronic device of some sort, and they drew back their arm as if to throw it.

"Stop right there," the Doctor was furious and grabbed the xetian's arm, but they were so startled that they dropped the object to the floor. "Everybody get back!" the Doctor ordered, pushing people away from the device as it rolled away. Persephone dodged out of the way, and with the motion of the tides underneath, it rolled into one of the many vending machines and got stuck in a corner between it and the wall. The Doctor looked petrified, braced for the worst, but nothing happened.

"Great, now you broke it," the xetian argued. The Aegean brothers and their entourage barely noticed the kerfuffle and began dragging the sqwill away from the submarine, taking it through the city with them and their forcefield, leaving a trail of glowing viscera in their wake. People continued to shout and jeer and most of the crowd broke off to follow them directly, leaving the port. The two xetians didn't move and neither did two more humans, also wearing diving suits. But these weren't the suits of the brothers nor of their divers, they were patchwork and rusty, and they weren't wearing helmets.

"Broke it!?" the Doctor was horrified, "Broke _that_!?"

"What is it?" Clara asked. Persephone had disappeared with the rest of the crowd, clearly anticipating injury if any of the bodyguards turned their harpoons on the crowd of civilians.

"It's a singularity bomb," said the xetian. The Doctor scoffed and took out her sonic screwdriver, handing the old, question-mark umbrella to Clara. She pointed the sonic in the direction of the 'bomb' and scanned, then sighed.

"You got lucky, it's faulty," she left the cover of the umbrella to go and pick the thing up. It was no bigger than a tangerine and looked like it had been constructed very quickly, with loose screws and wires all over it. "If this thing worked, it would have destroyed the whole city, I hope you realise that."

"I told you, Sostan," said one of the humans, a girl, touching the xetian's arm, "It's too dangerous."

"The Doctor built it, and I trust the Doctor."

"Excuse me?" asked the Doctor, "Did you say 'the Doctor'?" They nodded. "The Doctor built this faulty black hole machine?" Clara was alarmed to learn that _that_ was what the thing was, and now understood the Doctor's reaction.

"Yes," said Sostan, "The Doctor. The Time Lord. Do you know her?" He was scrutinising them, but Clara found it quite hard to understand his facial expressions – neither of the xetians had a visible mouth, though they were certainly talking, and their eyes morphed into unusual shapes like those of an octopus.

"Or him," added the other xetian, "They're a 'him' in the old stories."

"I, uh… a little…" she said unsurely. "Look – just – the Doctor is a pacifist. She wouldn't build a bomb, and especially not one like this."

"She returned to Xetia a few weeks ago, to help us," said Sostan.

"She did? The Doctor?"

"Do you want to meet her?" the other xetian asked.

"I…"

"Who are you, by the way?" Clara interrupted because the Doctor was floundering, unable to come up with something to say.

"I'm Aio," said the second xetian, "This is Nate and Alexa," she indicated the two humans. Nate was aloof and was still holding a large sign with a crudely drawn picture of a sqwill on it, reading 'Save the Sqwills', despite the Aegean brothers both having left with the rest of the crowds. It seemed like these four were the only ones concerned about the sqwills, while everybody else wanted answers for the sickness spreading through the city. "We're peaceful protestors. Well, as long as Sostan doesn't get his way, we are…"

"We need more direct action," Sostan argued, "They're not listening to us, and all our radio transmissions are being blocked-"

"The radio transmissions aren't our concern, the Doctor said she'll fix those for us eventually, as long as we stay out of her way," said Aio. It sounded like they'd had this conversation before, more than once.

"Well, it's, uh… nice to meet you," Clara managed to smile, despite her concern for their methods and morals, "I'm Clara. This is-"

"Do you say the Doctor is down there in Xetia?" the Doctor cut her off.

"She's been helping with our power supply," said Aio, "Something like that. We just have to stay out of her way."

"Who are you?" asked Sostan, then he paused, "Wait… you're not a Time Lord as well, are you? The Doctor said we should watch out for any other Time Lords."

"I am, as a matter of fact," she said, "I'm the Corsair." Clara didn't have a clue who 'the Corsair' was. "I'm an old acquaintance of the Doctor. She'll be dying to see me, I'm sure."

"The Doctor said to be careful of other Time Lords pretending to be her."

"Really? How far-sighted of her. Here I've always thought she was more of an improviser," said the Doctor. Then she cleared her throat, "But, as I said, I'm the Corsair. She'll be dying to see me, don't you worry. And, y'know, if she's so busy I might be able to help you out with your radio problem."

"If we fix the radios, we can send a message about what the Aegeans are doing," Alexa said.

"We don't have any spare diving suits, though," Nate interrupted, the first thing he'd said, putting down his sign finally, "We've only got these two." He meant the suits he and Alexa were both wearing.

"That's fine, we've got some. We can go grab them right now."

"Are you really a Time Lord?" Sostan was still suspicious.

"What do you wanna do, check my pulse? Because you can," she held out her free hand, still holding the bomb in her other. Sostan took this invitation and touched her wrist with his strange, tentacle finger. Since she _was_ a Time Lord and did have a double pulse, this satisfied him.

"…Fine, you can come with us, but don't make any trouble for the Doctor."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"You're lucky we were planning on heading back to Xetia."

"In that case, just think of me as your friendly, neighbourhood hitchhiker," she smiled, "We'll be right along to meet you once we get suited up." After some more encouragement from Alexa and Aio, Nate remaining silent once more, Sostan finally agreed that if they came back with diving suits within fifteen minutes, they'd give them a lift down to Xetia on the seafloor. Clara hardly had a chance to thank them before she was dragged away by the Doctor as quickly as possible.

"When you say, 'diving suits', you don't mean that thing Jacques Cousteau gave you, right?" she asked sceptically as the Doctor tugged on her hand. They were backtracking through the rainy, windy slums.

"Of course not – we'll just wear the spacesuits."

"Do spacesuits work underwater?"

"Depends on the suit. The ones your sister made for us all definitely will, they're very versatile. A garden-variety, Earthling EVA suit couldn't withstand the pressure _or_ the temperatures," she explained.

"But… space is colder than water, isn't it?"

"Well, yeah, but water is much more conductive. Those suits work in all kinds of environments, they're also resistant to most forms of acid and high concentrations of ionizing radiation."

"I mean, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Oswin is actually quite clever." The Doctor gave her a look. "What's going on, anyway? Who's 'the Corsair'?"

"An old friend of mine."

"Do you think that's this other Time Lord they're talking about? It can't be you. They sound nothing like you."

"It's not, but it's not the Corsair, either. They wouldn't give out bombs like this to people just like I wouldn't, let alone faulty ones," the Doctor said, holding up the device. They were walking so quickly it was hard for Clara to get a good look at it, but it looked like a grenade with wires falling out. "The entropy equations for this thing are all wrong, whoever built it doesn't understand half of the core tenets of thermodynamics. I'd never make a mistake like this; I could build you a black hole generator in my sleep. I wouldn't, of course, not after the incident with the donkey, but I _could_ , and it would work perfectly."

"It's probably just the Master, then," said Clara.

"Normally that would be my first assumption, but the workmanship is still too shoddy. You'd wanna bet your bottom dollar that if the Master built a black hole bomb, the thing would work," she explained, "But this? Don't get me wrong, it has a lot of the hallmarks of an advanced mind of some kind, and it…" She paused, frowning at the object in question.

"What?" Clara prompted.

"It rubs me the wrong way, that's all… whatever. Sooner we get down to Xetia and meet this stranger for ourselves, the better. At least I'll finally get to show you the city, it really _is_ like I described. I must've just overshot the date."

"Mm, you've got a habit of doing that…"

"It's not my fault the TARDIS doesn't have a manual."

"It _is_ your fault, because _you_ threw it away."

"Po-tay-to, po-tah-to."

"Have you not heard of this colony, then?" Clara changed the subject.

"Humans living on Xetos? No. I'm surprised that the sqwills seem to be the only point of contention, though."

"Yeah – what was that you were saying about the sqwills? They're V-Class organisms?"

"The 'V' is for 'vital', as in, organisms essential for life. When a planet – or a moon, in this case – becomes advanced enough to join the galactic community, one of the things they can do is nominate certain lifeforms for classifications like this. It means it's against intergalactic law for anyone to kill a sqwill," she explained as they rounded a corner and the TARDIS, nestled in a metal alcove, came into view.

"…Does Earth have any V-Class organisms?"

"Oh, plenty. In fact, planets have a bad habit of nominating most of their animals, though there are other, general poaching laws… dogs are V-Class organisms."

"Dogs? But they're not endangered," said Clara, the Doctor pushing open the door.

"They don't have to be endangered, just important. Dogs are very important to Earth culture. Poaching sqwills isn't just illegal though, it's dangerous, and if the Shadow Proclamation get wind of this I don't wanna know what they'll do to these Aegean brothers."

"They can't just buy their way out of trouble? That's what rich people usually do," Clara shook out the umbrella and rain splattered onto the floor of the console room.

"Not if I have anything to do with it… and leave the umbrella," she walked around the console to go deeper into the ship, "Where we're going, we don't need umbrellas."

"Proud of yourself for that?" Clara jibed.

"Always. Now, come on; time to get suited up."


	39. The Twilight Zone - Chapter 2

_The Twilight Zone_

 _2_

The submarine was a rust bucket if she ever saw one. Clara couldn't believe it could stay afloat, and did not like the presence of leaks in the walls and roof; she couldn't take her eye off a drip sneaking around a big slab of metal welded onto the wall.

Nate was piloting the submarine, which was of human design and clearly wasn't designed for six people, while Sostan and Alexa bickered. It had quickly become apparent that they were a couple, and though Clara wasn't very good at understanding the xetian facial expressions yet, it was clear that Aio was exasperated listening to them. She actually welcomed the Doctor's myriad questions, the Doctor who was fixated on the view out of the front window.

"What is all that?" she asked, staring through the glass. Clara was sure she could see the bright lights and holograms of even more vending machines and advertisements out there, despite them having just descended beneath the water.

"It's the Platform," said Aio.

"What's the Platform?"

"It's the underwater part of Aegean-4," she said, "It has and facilities for us to use. Xetians, I mean, not protestors." Through the watery gloom, Clara thought it looked like a lot of catwalks, only they were suspended beneath the colossal, opaque object that was the city itself. It was a good thing the submarine had headlights; it would be impossible to navigate down there by the distant white dwarf star otherwise.

"Then – what's _that_?" the Doctor was astonished by whatever she spotted now. Clara was still struggling to see much at all, but slowly something else enormous came into view.

"One of the turbines," said Aio, "How do you get to Xetos without knowing about Aegean-4?"

"Time travel," said the Doctor, still pretending to be the Corsair, "You always miss your mark. I was hoping to catch the Doctor on her _last_ visit, years ago."

"The city is a power plant, it generates electricity with the turbines and then Aegean Industries sells it to… whoever they sell it to, I don't know."

"They don't sell to Xetia?" the Doctor asked.

"We have the volcano, we don't need tides," she said.

"Isn't it bad to have that thing up there?" asked Clara, confused by the presence of one city floating directly above another, "It blocks out what little starlight you must get."

"Ooh, that's a good question," said the Doctor. Clara smiled a little.

"We don't need a lot of light, Xetia is already quite high up," said Aio, "We get most of our heat from the volcano, and the placement of Aegean-4 was calculated very carefully. Our important reefs get all the light they need."

"Xetia is… it's sort of like the twilight zone on Earth," the Doctor explained to Clara, "Where all the bioluminescent fish hang out."

"I've never understood why they glow when it's so dark down there," Clara mused, "Doesn't it attract predators?"

"No, it's camouflage. Don't you listen to Cameron when he talks about biology?"

"I don't listen to Cameron when he talks about anything," said Clara. She felt very strange discussing their day jobs while on a weekend getaway to an alien moon on the other side of the galaxy.

"Well, _you_ can't see the tiny flecks of sunlight in the twilight zone, but the fish can, and them glowing like that makes them blend in with the sunbeams. It's neat. I'm surprised you don't know that when you like the sea so much," she turned and then added to Aio, "She grew up on the coast, on Earth."

"My parents went to Earth for their honeymoon," said Aio.

"Really?" Clara was surprised, "Is it far…?"

"It's a couple thousand lightyears away," said the Doctor, "I think a commercial cruise would take you about a week with the current state of warp drives. Where'd they go on Earth?"

"They always wanted to see the Mariana Trench. They've got photos."

"I've heard that Megalodons live in there – is that true?" Clara asked her wife.

"Not in this time period. D'you wanna go back and see when they did?"

"Um… not particularly. I don't really like sharks after that whole… thing…" she trailed off and the Doctor didn't continue their conversation, her attention waning and drifting back towards the window. Thinking about sharks was making Clara anxious again, which got progressively worse the deeper they went. They were far below Aegean-4 now, and though she thought she could see speckles of light in the distance she wasn't focused on them. She took the Doctor's hand.

"Are you okay?" the Doctor asked softly, whispering so only she could hear.

"Mm… I just… it's the sea, I don't know, I…" The Doctor squeezed her hand.

"It'll be alright. I've got you right here to keep an eye on me, Coo-Bear."

"Can I just ask something?" Aio interrupted. Clara looked at her expectantly. "The two of you… are you…?"

"We're married," they said at the same time.

"A human and a Time Lord? Is that normal?"

"Didn't realise you were prejudiced against inter-species relationships," Alexa quipped from near Sostan at the front of the sub.

"I'm not!" Aio protested, "It's just… is it allowed? The Doctor doesn't seem to like humans much. She doesn't seem to like anybody." The mysterious Doctor hiding in Xetia was not a people person, apparently.

"It's frowned upon," the Doctor said, "But, uh… they're basically all dead now. Nobody's left to tell me off."

"The Doctor might," said Sostan.

"Well, I think the Doctor quite likes Clara," she said, then decided to try and change the subject, "Y'know, I've always wanted to ride on a xetian spaceship, those things blow my mind. They're so heavy."

"They are?" asked Clara.

"Because of the water," Aio said, "Humans carry air around with them, we need the water."

"Not that mass is hugely important with faster than light travel," the Doctor added again, "When you reach a certain speed, all mass is infinite. Then you just gotta," she raised her hands (having to let go of Clara's) and lightly punched her own palm, "Break through. Unless you're _really_ clever and you build a machine that exists everywhere and everywhen at once, of course."

"Who'd ever be _that_ clever?" Clara joked a little.

"I'll call you when I find out." She turned towards the window again and a grin split across her face. "There! You see?" she pointed, " _That's_ what I'm talking about, a whole city at the bottom of the sea."

A smattering of vibrant lights swam towards them through the dark ocean, and it really was just as the Doctor described. A vast, sprawling city spread across the slopes of an underwater mountain with endless fields of glowing, coral reefs and strange, rocky buildings. There were other submarines and bathyspheres bobbing along above the rooftops and the crisscrossing streets, many of them of alien design and steadily ascending to go to Aegean-4 and the Platform. Then Clara began to make out the inhabitants themselves, xetians free from the bulky suits Sostan and Aio were wearing; humanoid cephalopods gliding between the plant life and the infrastructure – though the two were almost indistinguishable to her untrained eye. In all Clara's years travelling with the Doctor, she didn't think she had ever seen a place quite like Xetia.

"We should've brought Captain Nemo, he'd love this," said the Doctor as Nate piloted the sub down so it cruised above the crowds, approaching a metal structure that didn't fit in with the rest of Xetia.

"Captain Nemo doesn't have the capacity for emotion," said Clara, "And he pees out of his face."

"You're such a spoilsport," the Doctor dismissed her. She raised her voice to address the others, "What's that up ahead?"

"A dock, for the humans," Sostan answered. It had a few other submarines lingering there, but not many; less than half a dozen. They were buoyant and had chains keeping them tethered to the small dock.

"So, whereabouts do we find this Doctor?" asked the Doctor, "I wouldn't want to keep such a good friend waiting."

"In the caves," said Sostan as Nate brought the sub to a halt above the dock, "But you can't go straight in there, you need permission from Zono."

"We don't need to talk to Zono," said Aio. Sostan scoffed. "What?"

"Just because she doesn't approve of you hanging around with us," he remarked. Aio wasn't happy with that comment. Nate cut the engine. The Doctor was about to ask who Zono was, but the logistics of how they should all navigate the airlock quickly took over the conversation. It wasn't big enough for all six, so Sostan, Aio and Alexa went first because they said it was better for the two xetians to talk to Zono. That left Clara and the Doctor with only Nate for company.

"Who's Zono?" the Doctor asked as soon as she had the opportunity, the airlock closing behind the other three to let them out. Nate was checking the inside of his helmet was empty before he put it back on.

"Aio's mother," he said shortly, "She's the ambassador to Aegean-4, it's her job to try and fix this problem with the sqwills."

"And what's your stake in the whole sqwill-thing?" the Doctor pressed him for information. He was not willing to give it, however, and simply refused to answer.

"Do you have a comm-link in those fancy suits? You'll need one to hear anybody out there," said Nate.

" _Yes_ , I'll just deal with that now… if I could just remember which of these pockets…" the Doctor fumbled with the spacesuit. Both of their suits were ancient now, covered in marks and scars from where they had been repaired over and over again over the years. The Doctor had a bad habit of putting stickers on hers, though, almost entirely ones bearing activist political slogans. _Eat the Rich_ , _No Nukes_ , _Make Love Not War_. Clara didn't think they would survive the deep water.

Finally, the Doctor found her sonic screwdriver in a holster specifically designed to keep screwdrivers in them. Clara was surprised the Doctor had remembered to move the screwdriver somewhere sensible.

"Those things aren't waterproof, are they?" asked Clara.

"This one is," said the Doctor, "Well, it's meant to be, it hasn't been rigorously tested in deep water. Not like the last one." Which Clara had possession of, though she'd left it in the TARDIS for that very reason. "Actually, the last one was also meant to be made of sturdy stuff, after that shark ate it. Not the sharks in Belfast, one on this other planet – Ember. A flying shark."

"A flying shark…?" asked Clara. The Doctor didn't answer, instead pointing the sonic screwdriver at the bulky, mechanical collar of the spacesuit. Clara heard a crackle and then a resounding buzz of feedback, then voices began to come through crystal clear. It sounded like an argument but was quickly interrupted.

" _What was that?_ " It was Sostan.

"Just your friendly, neighbourhood Corsair," said the Doctor, her voice also coming through the speakers inside Clara's helmet.

" _Well… the airlock's empty now, you can join us out here_ ," said Sostan.

" _Yes, please, introduce me to this renegade Time Lord you happen to have run across…_ " said a new voice.

"I'm the Corsair," said the Doctor, pushing a button on the collar so that the glass helmet curled out from the back, like the roof of a convertible, and locked in at the front. Clara didn't understand how the space helmets worked but wasn't one to question her sister's ingenuity. She put her helmet up too, the voices still coming through loud and clear across the newly established comm link. The trio clambered into the airlock after Nate opened the door.

" _The Corsair?_ "

"Yes, and you must be Zono? The interspecies liaison for Xetia?" Nate pulled the door shut. They had to crouch in the _very_ small airlock. An alarm sounded and it steadily began to fill with water.

" _Yes_."

"I like the personal touch of coming to meet visitors at the dock here, a lot of ambassadors would consider that kind of thing beneath them," said the Doctor.

" _She's only here because of me_ ," Aio grumbled.

" _Aio, the situation has grown more complex_ -" Zono began softly.

" _I understand the situation, I just_ -"

" _I don't want you going to the surface anymore. Not until this can be remedied_."

" _You sound like such a politician_ ," Aio argued. At that moment, she reminded Clara of Matilda.

" _Divisions are only going to get worse if you ban people from going to the surface_ ," Sostan argued.

" _I'm not banning people; I'm protecting my daughter. You're too young to understand_."

" _Most of those humans up there are suffering because of the Aegeans just like we are_ ," Sostan continued, ignoring her. Clara wondered how old they were; she didn't think Nate and Alexa could be more than twenty. The water rose above her helmet, submerging them all. It was very cold. " _Someone needs to do something_."

" _I'm doing everything I can. You four are becoming a liability_ ," Zono continued. The alarm sounded again, this time muffled by the water, and Nate opened the door. They clambered out to see Sostan, Aio and Alexa challenging Zono. They'd taken their helmets off now they were back in the sea.

"Bureaucracy isn't going to fix anything. They don't want to listen to us, we have to make them," Sostan was still raging, "We were just up there, and they had a… a… what was it they had?" he turned and asked the Doctor.

"Sonic barrier," she said, "Basically a forcefield that also blocks out soundwaves."

"You see?" said Sostan, "They won't even listen to us, as they parade a dead sqwill through the streets."

"Do you know why they had to dock at the side of the city, Sostan?" Zono said, "Because they were up there hunting and got attacked by a wrangler, and when someone went to help them – a reef farmer – he accidentally shot their fuel tank with a harpoon and they took that as an assault. Now I'm in the middle of an incident and you're _not helping_." Sostan finally shut up. Zono turned back to the Doctor and Clara. "You're the Corsair?"

"Absolutely, that's who I am, for definite," said the Doctor, smiling, "And this is Clara. Heard an old friend of mine is hanging around down here and thought I'd stop in and say hi – and I promised the kids here I'd take a look at your situation with the radio."

"The Corsair is a pirate," said Zono.

"But never a poacher," said the Doctor, "So, uh… and y'know, I've… dabbled with the old pirate radio, so, um…"

"Are you a Time Lord as well?" Zono asked Clara while the Doctor fumbled, trying not to get caught in a lie.

"No, I'm a human," said Clara, "From Earth."

"Really? I've been to Earth; we saw the Mariana Trench. Have you seen it?" On her honeymoon, as Aio had said.

"I have not, sadly," said Clara.

"I think it's the most romantic spot on the whole planet."

"Well, Niagara Falls might fight you on that," she joked. It wasn't very funny. "But, erm… the falls are overrated, to be honest. I think the best date I ever went on was bar hopping in New York all night."

" _That's_ the best date you've ever been on?" the Doctor challenged her, "We've done that loads of times."

"When we broke into the Museum of Modern Art."

" _Oh_ , right, that was…" she got lost in the memory for a second or two, then cleared her throat. "Anyway. Radios. The Doctor. She'll be dying to see me, I'm sure."

"…I can take you," said Zono, "But you four stay right here. I don't want that submarine going back to the surface until you understand the implications of your actions."

"We get it, you don't have to keep going on…" said Aio, exasperated.

"We'll get in touch if we need a ride back topside," said the Doctor as they trudged towards the steps down from the dock. Well, Nate and Alexa trudged, weighed down by their suits and the pressure; Aio and Sostan swam. Underwater, they moved just like an octopus would. "Kids, huh? Who needs them?"

"I understand their frustration, but it's a delicate matter," said Zono. They also descended from the docking platform but went in the opposite direction to the youths and towards the volcano the entire city was nestled into the slopes of.

"What're the juicy details, then? Lay it on me." Zono gave the Doctor a strange look. "We saw them bring the dead sqwill out." She didn't mention Sostan and his 'singularity bomb.'

"About a year ago the two brothers came to take over operations of Aegean-4, after an unfortunate accident with the previous city manager."

"Accident?" asked the Doctor as they reached street level. None of the xetians gave them a second look.

"Choked on a gold-coated truffle."

"They… that's a joke, right?" asked Clara.

"Why would it be a joke? Is it funny?"

"It's deeply ironic for the person in charge of a corporate hellscape like that to choke to death on a gold-coated truffle… not to laugh at the suffering of other people," said Clara. "Like when you hear a consultant cardiologist had a heart attack because he's eaten too much wagyu beef."

"I didn't realise the famous Corsair also travelled with a companion," said Zono.

"You've heard a lot about the Corsair, then?" asked the Doctor. Clara, by comparison, had heard nothing about the Corsair. "By which I mean me. As a Time Lord, I'm hugely arrogant and frequently talk about myself in the third person."

"It's true," said Clara, "She's always doing that."

"I've been interested in Time Lords ever since I met the Doctor, when I was a hatchling. He helped prevent the destruction of Pheran. Or, she now. Not that it's easy to find information on them anymore."

"No, the Doctor's really, uh… tried to make info scarce. But – tell me about how the Doctor _then_ compares to the Doctor _now_ , out of curiosity."

"Well…" Zono began as they walked, making slow progress. Clara felt like she was in an episode of _SpongeBob_ , and desperately hated that that was the first thing that sprang to mind. Xetians drifted past them, around small gardens full of glowing plants with smaller, alien fish with three eyes darting around as well. "It's just… she didn't remember something she said to me. But it was a long time ago." The Doctor began to think about this, sinking into a silence.

"…How old are those kids, then?" Clara decided to ask a question now it looked like she had the opportunity.

"Only just old enough to drive that submarine. It was Nathan's father's, but he died recently."

"He did? Of what?"

"I'm not sure. There have been a lot of deaths in the city since the brothers took over from the last manager. They've relaxed a lot of safety laws."

"We've seen, almost everyone up there who works underwater has decompression sickness," said the Doctor. They were approaching a cave mouth now, signposted by bright, electric lights. "Which seems to be most of the people. But what about the sqwills, and the radio? Their poaching is a violation of intergalactic law."

"Yes, but our off-world communications haven't been working for the last few months. Nobody has been able to work out what's causing it."

"Do you think it's the Aegeans?"

"I couldn't say. If it _was_ them, we would have no way to prove it. And the Doctor is looking into it."

"Yeah, well – if she's got too much on her plate, I'm more than happy to see if I can dig anything up."

"You already offered."

"I'm passionate about radios. I even suggested to my wife that we should get walkie-talkies to communicate with each other."

"Just get a phone," Clara muttered for the umpteenth time.

"I will not." Clara rolled her eyes. "Anyway, worse comes to worst, I'll just take my TARDIS to the Shadow Proclamation directly and tell them what's going on. Or I'll send Clara to do it. I think they want to arrest me, and I can't give them the opportunity."

"Sounds _great_ …" said Clara.

"You keep those kids out of trouble if they do take you back to the surface," Zono advised, "Sostan's the ringleader, and he's reckless. I know he means well, but… he's not old enough to see the full picture yet." They entered the cave in the side of the volcano, the passage lit up by more LEDs.

"The sqwills, though," the Doctor reiterated, "Have you tried to talk to them about it?"

"I've _tried_ , but they refuse to grant me a meeting. We try to stop them hunting, but there's only so much we can do. We can't arrest them, we don't have the facilities to house human prisoners, and we can't contact anybody else. But they just won't listen to reason."

"Has the Doctor tried to negotiate?"

"Oh, no. I wouldn't ask her to get involved in local politics like this."

"What, exactly, is she doing down here?"

"Studying the volcano, trying to help us improve the efficiency of our geothermal plant, and resolving a problem we have with chemical waste."

"Chemical waste?"

"I don't really understand the science. She has a lab assistant, Emix, to help her. One of our own. Oh, and she's excavating."

"Excavating?"

"To expand the plant."

"And you're just letting her?"

"She's the Doctor."

"Maybe people trust the Doctor a little _too_ much…" The irony of this statement wasn't lost on either of them; Clara trusted the Doctor with every aspect of her life, and so did most people who met her. The closer they got to unravelling this mystery, the more enticing it was.

They passed a large cluster of glowing barnacles nestled on the wall, which reminded Clara of the strange barnacle Adam Mitchell had had growing on his arm for decades. It never got any bigger or changed, but if they removed it he'd have an un-heeling, open wound; such were the drawbacks of cryokinesis. Clara had to admit, despite her reservations about deep water, it was a beautiful city; even the caves were stunning, and she hoped they could help the people both in Xetia and Aegean-4 with all the issues plaguing them.

"You can't be here!" A xetian nearly crashed into them coming around a corner in the cave, swimming so fast that the Doctor and Clara had to dodge. "You can't."

"Emix, it's fine," said Zono as they twisted around in the water to face the group, "They're with me."

"No," said Emix, the Doctor's alleged lab assistant, "The Doctor isn't taking visitors at the moment. You should turn back."

"Nonsense," said the actual Doctor, putting her hands on her hips, "She's a friend of mine. I'm a Time Lord as well."

"It's _really_ not a good time."

"This is the Corsair," said Zono, "She's just been on the surface, she thinks she can help with the communications problems and inform the Shadow Proclamation about the situation with the sqwill poaching."

"I…" Emix faltered, "She…"

"Please," the Doctor implored, "If she's the Doctor I know, she'll want to see me. And I swear I'll help with the sqwills if she's too busy with… whatever it is she's up to. Something very important, I'm sure."

"…She might see _one_ visitor."

"And Clara," said the Doctor, "She comes everywhere with me."

"This is on my authority," said Zono, "I'm the liaison-"

"You're a _diplomat_ , this is a much more sensitive…" Emix stopped talking and looked away for a second; Clara realised she had an earpiece on the side of her head. "I'm just… you have visitors… I know, that's what I – well, it's a Time Lord… the Corsair…" She was talking to 'the Doctor.' "Oh. Yes, I'll – alright…"

"Well?" Zono prompted.

"She says she wants to see the Corsair immediately."

"Of course she does," said the Doctor, "Why wouldn't she? I'm very likeable. Is it just this way, then? I can see myself in; c'mon, Coo." She grabbed Clara's arm through the water.

"We'll be in touch," Clara added hastily to Zono as they passed her in the tunnel.

"I'll be nearby. I have to go have some words with my daughter, in the meantime," said Zono as they separated. As the Doctor threatened to overtake Emix in her own domain, Emix – who was wearing one of the bulky suits like Aio and Sostan – swam ahead to lead them. It quickly became clear why she needed the suit; the water level began to get lower and they surfaced, climbing up a sloping passageway past more lights. Then Emix was at a disadvantage and could no longer swim, having to crawl along on tentacles.

The tunnels opened up into a cavern, within which an advanced laboratory was housed. Its most defining feature was a cylindrical structure running its length in a neat circle, propped up on makeshift metal legs and a little under two feet thick. Everything else of note was contained within the cylinder, and Clara saw an array of large tanks full of a substance glowing faintly blue. There were other tanks inside them, but they were silver and opaque. In the centre of the room was the person who presumably had been talking to Emix through her comms device, a woman with dark hair and a very severe expression. Her gaze fell upon the Doctor.

"These are the people who wanted to see you," said Emix tentatively. The woman narrowed her eyes.

"Leave us now," she ordered. Emix turned to them.

"She says you should-"

"No, _you_ leave, Emix. Must you make me repeat myself? Anymore disobedience and you will forfeit the great privilege I am affording you; working alongside the Doctor herself." Emix fidgeted – she was clearly frightened, and Clara could see why just from their brief exchange. The Doctor didn't say a word as Emix disappeared back into the tunnel. The Time Lords waited until they heard the splash of her returning to the water to do anything, at which point the Doctor slapped the top of the cylinder like it was a car roof.

"Nice particle accelerator," she said, "A little bulky for my tastes, but I suppose if it gets the job done."

"My sources told me you were dead."

"You should get better sources, then. And maybe don't steal my identity if you don't want me to put a stop to your plan."

"What plan?"

"I don't know yet. I'll work it out, though," she ducked underneath the cylinder into the centre of the room.

"To think, for a moment I believed it _was_ the Corsair paying a visit."

"Sorry to be a disappointment."

"Where is he these days?"

"Dead. I've seen his body. Bits of it, anyway." Clara didn't think she wanted the full story behind that – but who was _this_ Time Lord? Not the Master, not the Corsair, and certainly not the Doctor.

"You should take better care of your associates."

"Uh-huh," said the Doctor, unconvinced. She seemed to have forgotten that Clara was in the room at all, at least up until that moment when she turned and glimpsed her out of the corner of her eye. "This is the Rani," she finally explained. Only then did the Rani realise there was someone else in the room. "An old… well, not _friend_ … she's one of the most brilliant minds to ever come out of Gallifrey, and the most evil."

"Nonsense," said the Rani, "Evil implies malice, and I have no malice, only contempt. Contempt and disdain for these fetid creatures you insist on befriending."

"Then what could you be doing on Xetos? They think you're helping them."

"It's nothing you should concern yourself with," said the Rani.

"Really? Because I happened to stumble across a black hole bomb when I was up in the city," said the Doctor seriously, "Looks a lot like those gizmos on the table behind you. It's funny, because I clearly remember the last time we ran into each other, you needed _my_ help to get your little experiment to work."

"I was assembling the greatest minds in the universe, _you_ arrived by complete accident. And were fooled into helping me with a fancy-dress costume, if _I_ remember clearly," the Rani jibed, turning away from the Doctor and Clara to focus on her devices.

"Why are you building those things? Are you sure it's worth the risk? You never _were_ any good with thermodynamics." The Rani grimaced. "It didn't work, by the way – didn't detonate. Leave it to you to grossly miscalculate the entropy conversion rate of a locally generated micro-singularity."

"What was that? I didn't hear you."

"I said the entropy conversion rate was… hang on!" The Rani laughed coldly. "I won't fix your toys for you."

"So I need to re-examine the entropy conversion rate… thank you, Doctor. You've been a big help. I shan't make the same mistake again." The Doctor scoffed, irritated. "As always, your hubris is your downfall. If you fought this compulsion you have to appear as the most intelligent one in the room, you might be less predictable. That's _my_ advice, to _you_."

"I'll be sure to take it on board," said the Doctor sarcastically. "But why give the bombs to those kids?"

"I didn't. I wouldn't let those insipid squids have access to _my_ work, lest they create some sort of diplomatic incident and destroy that ridiculous, floating city." She paused, the Doctor waiting for an answer. "They stole it."

"From right under your nose?"

"No. I was elsewhere. I can't punish them the way I'd like without tarnishing _your_ good name, and it's the only reason I have access to these facilities at all. Besides, if they blew themselves up, I wouldn't _need_ to think about punishing them. But if you say the device didn't work I haven't lost much by the way of good science."

"But why do you need the singularity bombs at all?" the Doctor implored. The Rani did not deign to answer this question; it seemed like they were both very good at getting on each other's last nerve. Clara idled nearby, unsure of what she should be doing. But then the Doctor had an epiphany. "Oh, don't tell me you're using them to excavate!" The Rani, again, said nothing. The Doctor took that as a 'yes.' "Why don't you try to dig with something a little less volatile – like a stick of dynamite, or a nuke?"

"Sorry – she's using black holes to dig underneath a _volcano_!?" asked Clara in horror.

"It's futile for a human to try and understand the scope of my research. You yourself can hardly manage, Doctor," said the Rani, glaring at Clara.

"She's right," said the Doctor firmly, "You could trigger an eruption that could destroy both cities. And for future reference, don't ever speak about her like that again, or you'll make me even angrier than I already am." The Rani only laughed again.

"You have always gotten too attached to these pets."

"Is that the tunnel over there?" the Doctor pointed at a dark alcove on the far side of the cavern, beyond the rim of the particle accelerator and the workstation the Rani was currently using.

Clara was alarmed when the Doctor took off running towards the dark corner and didn't know whether she should follow. She took a few steps around the outside of the circular tubes but stopped dead when the Rani picked up a blaster from the cluster of machinery on the table. So did the Doctor, because she was the one the gun was being aimed at. The Doctor froze and raised her hands in surrender, but still craned her neck to get a look at the alcove over her shoulder.

"I see why you need the bombs, that tunnel is pretty _rock solid_ if you ask me," she said, and then she began to enunciate very clearly, "It's a shame you can't walk through walls."

"Yes. Quite." The Rani put down the harpoon gun as the Doctor backed away from her, towards the blueish tanks of liquid. Clara, however, needed to go into action, because that hadn't been a snide comment: it had been an instruction. The Doctor wanted _her_ to sneak through the rock and investigate where the Rani could not.

"Tell me about the radios," said the Doctor, "Are you going to fix them?"

"Why should I fix something that works in my favour? It keeps the Shadow Proclamation out of my way, which I am truly grateful for."

"It's not your doing?" The Rani put down the tools she was fumbling with and turned to face the Doctor directly, scrutinising her. She was trying to decide whether she should tell the truth.

"No. It's a – what is it the humans say? 'Happy coincidence.'"

"Serendipity," said the Doctor. "Do you know what the problem is? Do you have any transmission equipment down here?" She glanced around the cavern, doing a quick survey of all the items present. She couldn't see anything designed for communications, though.

"The interior of a volcano isn't the best place for sending long-range transmissions. But by all means, investigate the radios if it will keep you away from me," the Rani explained. "Do be careful not to catch 'the Blues,' as they call it."

"And what do you know about that?"

"I avoid the surface. Xetians are pitiful enough, but humans? They're so… insular."

"Well, that's never been my experience," said the Doctor, more to herself. She ambled over to peer at the vats of blue liquid, pulsing with radiation; she could taste it on the air.

"How old are you now?"

"A little over twelve-hundred." The Rani didn't make a quip; the Doctor assumed this meant they were still the same age. If she was significantly older she would lord it over the Doctor, she wouldn't be able to resist.

"And how much of that time have you spent gallivanting with those apes?" The Doctor didn't answer this, she only laughed a little to herself. "What was that?"

"What was what?"

"You're smirking." The Doctor didn't think she was actually doing anything with the tools on her table, just using them to pretend like she was busy when really she was watching the Doctor's every move.

"I wasn't. What's your goop, anyhow? What're you growing in here?" the Doctor inquired about the big vats, knocking on the glass.

"Don't touch those," the Rani snarled.

"Ooh, must be something exciting if you're so protective," said the Doctor. She clambered up onto the base the tanks were stored on, much to the Rani's dismay, so that she could get a look into them directly. "It's sad that I'm not taller these days."

"Get down from there," the Rani ordered her as she lifted off the lid of the vat, which she carelessly let fall to the floor. Then she could lean on the rim to keep herself steady. "I'll shoot you."

"Oh, please," the Doctor ignored her and tugged off one of her spacesuit gloves, detaching it from the airtight seal (so much more convenient than those one-piece suits) and dipping her hand into the liquid. It was water, with extra toppings. She licked her finger. "Mm, tastes like a whole lot of caesium-137 with just a _dash_ of plutonium-250. I gotta say, it's not what I would choose for a mixer."

"Get down, you imbecile," the Rani dragged her elbow, so she was forced to jump off the base rather than come toppling down on top of her old friend.

"Cherenkov radiation always has a kick to it."

"I will not allow you to mangle my work."

"You're doing a pretty swell job of mangling it yourself, don't stop on my account."

"And what is _this_ ghastly thing?" The Rani grabbed the Doctor's wrist and pulled her hand up to her eye level. The Doctor had made a mistake and removed her left glove, and now the Rani had spotted her wedding ring.

"Oh, _that_ …? It's just, um…" She neither wanted to lie or tell the truth – truly stuck between a rock and a hard place…

Elsewhere, Clara was having a very different experience. At the Doctor's prompt, she had snuck around behind the glowing, blue vats of chemical and towards the rock tunnel in the midst of its excavations. She didn't really like trying to navigate tunnels intangibly, but she didn't have to worry about that for long. The tunnel blockage was only a few feet thick. Promptly she found herself in another cave, smaller than the one the Rani had set up her laboratory in, but with inferior airflow. She put her helmet back on along with the comms, able to listen to what the Doctor was saying in her absence in case they needed to make a quick getaway. They were only talking about the radios.

There were some pieces of equipment littering the cave, another electric light that was still turned on. It was a large floor lamp that had been knocked over in what she presumed was a cave-in, probably caused by these 'excavations', and Clara hauled it upright so she could get a better look around.

 _Then_ she spotted what was so interesting about these caves: there were large bones half-buried in the rock. They were rust-coloured rather than the white bones Clara was used to, but bones nonetheless. The Rani was digging up a fossil, but why? And why perform violent excavations with black hole bombs if she wanted to preserve a valuable asset? Clara couldn't make sense of it, but perhaps the Rani was right about the 'scope of her research.'

" _What's your goop, anyhow?_ " the Doctor said over the comms. Clara crouched down next to the bones to get a closer look. Could she take any of them? A small piece the Rani might not notice her carrying out? She didn't really want to snap a piece off, but maybe she would have to so that she could show the fossils to the Doctor.

A a memory came over Clara; she remembered their trip to Yellowstone, spelunking in the sulphur-filled caves of the caldera looking for an extinct mega-bear. That thing had almost been a fossil, too. It was human bodies they found in _those_ caves, though. The Doctor was talking about isotopes.

She spied what looked to her untrained eye like a skull. At least, it had a big, circular depression in it nearly a metre across but was risen out of the grown like a miniature volcano of its own. If there was a skull, there would probably be teeth, and teeth were something she could take. She was left with no alternative but to phase her arm through the ground and feel around blindly for anything she could retrieve. This was difficult because it was very hard to tell what was rock and what was bone, and she couldn't pick and choose which substances she passed through. The bone felt hollower though, the difference between dragging her arm through water or through gravy; acute, but definitely there, and she was finally able to dislodge something. Deftly, Clara brought her hand back to the air and discovered she had successfully pulled out a tooth. It was the weirdest tooth she had ever seen, it looked like two teeth morphed together, crisscrossing and coming to a very sharp point.

" _And what is_ this _ghastly thing_?"

" _Oh, that…? It's just, um…_ "

" _Every time I see you, you become more of a degenerate. You would tie yourself to a_ human?" the Rani asked. _Uh-oh_. Clara needed to get back. She got to her feet, tooth in hand, and slipped away through the rockface again.

"It's not a crime to fall in love," the Doctor defended herself, wrenching her hand free of the Rani's grasp and pulling her glove back on.

" _In love_?" the Rani sneered, "With who? The girl?" The Doctor said nothing. The Rani glanced around the room. "Where has it gone, the child you are apparently so infatuated with?"

"She's not a child. She's… older than she looks."

"Dear lord, what _have_ you done?"

"I haven't done anything," she lied.

"And here I thought you couldn't bring any more shame down on Gallifrey. I always knew you would give in and start fornicating with the creatures eventually – I hope you know they have no higher thought, only impulses. If you think it loves you, I pity you, Doctor." Clara emerged from the tunnel while the Doctor fumbled over her words.

"You don't – I – she's – you-"

"Funny, I've never seen you at a loss for words before. You can't think of a thing to say in defence of your new bride?" The Doctor just made an enraged noise in response to that.

"Interesting fossils you've got back there," Clara interrupted.

"Excuse me?" the Rani asked.

"In the cave," Clara nodded in the tunnel's direction, "Sorry – did she not mention? I can walk through walls." She kept the tooth hidden firmly in her fist as she walked around the outside of the cylinder to get back to the entrance. The Doctor saw what she was doing and also backed away from the Rani.

"If your pet has disturbed my research-"

"I'm not her pet," said Clara, "Although, we do do a lot of petting. Of the heavy variety. But, please, call me a degenerate if it makes you feel better about yourself." Clara was done being timid around the Rani if her relationship was being called into question. "I think it's about time for us to leave."

"And you do as she tells you? You bend to the whims of a fickle organism like this?"

"We can both be quite bendy in the right circumstances," said Clara. The Doctor ducked underneath the particle accelerator again to leave.

"Eurgh. Not just a human, but a repugnant one at that."

"It was nice to meet you as well!" Clara called, "My name is Clara, by the way. Always good to use people's names when you insult them behind their back, I think." The Rani only scoffed again, dismissing them both, and it was down to Clara to pull the Doctor out of the cavern by her hand. It was like she was shell-shocked, didn't say a word. In fact, it was worse than that, she was barely even there; it was Clara who pressed the button to get her helmet to re-emerge as they slipped back into the water when she failed to do so herself.

She did not have time to ask the Doctor what was the matter, however, because they were assailed by Zono as soon as they were beneath the surface.

"I'm so glad you're back," she said, "I need your help– Emix was refusing to go and retrieve you, and I haven't got a suit nearby."

"I can't interrupt the Doctor when she's working," said Emix, who had been standing guard in the tunnel apparently for the entire time they had been in there, "She ordered me to leave." Zono was clearly annoyed by this, but it sounded like they'd been having the argument for a while.

"What's going on?" asked the Clara when the Doctor didn't.

"The kids, they've gone back to the surface, they're threatening to protest one of Aegean-4's sponsors," Zono explained quickly, beckoning for them to follow her out of the volcano, "If it's not too much trouble, can you make sure they don't do anything reckless?"

"Of course," said Clara, "Where did they go?"

"Something about Milky Way Shakes, I'm not sure what they're planning… they might just picket, or they might try something more radical… I can't be seen meddling in things in the city, I-" she was panicking.

"It will be fine," Clara said firmly, "The Corsair and I will go and make sure no one gets hurt." The Doctor mumbled something in the affirmative. "How do we get to the surface without their submarine?"

"You'll have to take one of the public bathyspheres, I'll show you," Zono explained, leading them away, "What happened with the Doctor?"

"Just, um… you know how it is when you haven't seen someone for years. Awkward." That was an understatement. "Like a school reunion." Bad joke. "…Bathyspheres, then?"

"Right this way…"


	40. The Twilight Zone - Chapter 3

_The Twilight Zone_

 _3_

"I'm not sure how I feel about this automated bathysphere," said Clara as they rose steadily in their pressurised ball back to the surface, having been bundled into it by Zono. "This is even worse than the submarine. Does this constitute public transport? I didn't see any way to pay – is it nationalised?" She was trying to bait the Doctor into saying something – she did usually love to wax lyrical about socialism – but she wouldn't bite. "Sweetheart?" The Doctor looked up. "Do you want to talk?"

"I'm thinking," she said quietly. Clara sighed sadly. The Doctor frowned. "Are you holding something?"

"Oh," said Clara, opening her hand and realising she still had the strange tooth in her possession. She held it out towards her wife. "Took it from her dig site." The Doctor took it gently from Clara as the bathysphere continued to rise. "I think it's a tooth."

"Hm…" the Doctor examined it.

"I don't understand why you'd try to exhume a fossil with bombs."

"It's not the fossil she's interested in," said the Doctor, "She once incubated and hatched t-rex embryos on her TARDIS." Her eyes widened. "I'll bet _that's_ what's in those big tanks…"

"What?"

"She's doing a _Jurassic Park_. She doesn't need the whole fossil, only a part of it that contains a genome she can extract," explained the Doctor, "Fundamentally, she's a geneticist where Missy and I prefer physics."

"What do you mean?"

"We went to school together."

"Sorry – you, the Master, and the Rani all went to school together? You were in the same class?" Clara was aghast; it sounded like a living nightmare being that teacher.

"Yessiree Bob."

"Bloody hell…"

"She's right about the scope of her research, though. Peri and I once ran into her in England during the Luddite Rebellion; she was trying to steal brain chemicals from innocent workers for whatever twisted experiment she was doing, and what was the Master doing the entire time?"

"What?" asked Clara.

"Pulling pranks. Threw my TARDIS down a mineshaft, tried to kill me."

"The usual, then?"

"I think the Rani hates the Master more than she hates me. Always says we have an 'unhealthy obsession' with each other."

"She might have a point." The Doctor shot her a glare. Clara smiled to indicate she was joking. "If she's growing alien dinosaur embryos, shouldn't we do something?"

"It's non-urgent," said the Doctor, "Dinosaurs gestate for a long time." When Clara didn't think of something else to say right away, the Doctor sank into a state of pathos again.

"Are you sure you don't want to talk, wifey?" Clara asked softly. She almost never called the Doctor 'wifey'; it had always been Eleven's nickname for _her_ , but she brought it out in times of need. It certainly piqued the Doctor's attention now.

"I just feel stupid, that's all."

"Why?"

"For caring about what she says. Because I _don't_ care about what she says, or what she thinks – I don't care about her at all. But it…" she trailed off, eyes on the floor.

"I'll tell you a story," Clara began. "When I was at uni, they did a big sexual health awareness campaign with an emphasis on HIV, right? So, because I'm… you know, _me_ , I decided that I'd go get tested. I went with a gay friend of mine because he needed to go as well and when we went into the clinic there was this girl picketing outside. Just her, on her own, in the rain with a sign that just had written on it 'God Hates Fags.' Barely a sign actually, just a piece of cardboard drawn on with a marker. Had to squint to read it, and there it was. _God Hates Fags_. She didn't even talk to us as we went in. But do you know what the funniest thing of all was? People had been warned about picketers beforehand. A few days earlier some other evangelist got escorted off-campus for saying some nasty shit about AIDS; it made the uni paper. So, we went there expecting _exactly_ this and once we were inside the clinic _I_ started crying. Which is crazy, isn't it? It's not like I haven't been subjected to homophobia before, and here it was in exactly the _place_ you would expect being performed in exactly the _way_ you expect, and the slur's not even directed at me, but for some reason it still got me. It cut through all the barriers I'd built up. And I don't care what that girl thought about gay people, and I was prepared for it, and _still,_ they managed to upset me.

"That kind of shit hurts no matter where it comes from. Quite frankly, it's more warped to be desensitised to it. What does it say about me to think that it's normal to brush off the cognitive dissonance of overt homophobia rather than take a vitriolic attack on my personal life to heart?" She'd gotten a little off track, but the Doctor was still listening. The Doctor always listened to Clara. "The test was negative, by the way."

"Glad to hear it."

"I think it's okay if you're upset. Even if you're normally so big and strong. Not physically, obviously, but emotionally. Intellectually."

"I'm not ashamed of you," she said bluntly.

"I never thought you were."

"That's not why I didn't – you know I would… defend your honour, I just-"

"Okay," Clara held up a hand to get her to stop talking, "First of all, while I appreciate your undying commitment to romantic gestures, I can defend my own honour. Second of all, I get it, and – is it supposed to do that?" The bathysphere jerked and wobbled as it burst from the ocean, bobbing upon the shadowy waves with the white dwarf star once again visible in the sky through the porthole. It started to move to the side, towards the looming edge of Aegean-4. "Does this thing have an engine?"

"No, it'll be a magnet system," said the Doctor. The bathysphere was pulled up to street level and automatically docked. "The whole circumference of this thing is basically one big dock; the bathysphere can land anywhere." Once it stopped moving the door clicked open. Clara took the lead to push the small door open and clamber out onto the slick metal walkway, helping the Doctor lest she slip and fall into the sea.

"Where do you think Milky Way Shakes is, then?" Clara asked, but the Doctor had frozen _again_. This time was different though, _now_ she was having an epiphany. She hit her forehead with her hand.

"I'm so stupid, Clara! Hair loss, skin atrophy, bleeding gums – those are symptoms of radiation sickness!" she exclaimed.

"Where did we see those symptoms?"

"They're what Persephone said the side-effects of taking Glow are," the Doctor reminded her, "And she said it's a recent development here. And the Rani is down there conducting weird, radiation experiments…"

"But she had everything in those tanks, how would it get into a drug on the surface?" asked Clara.

"Depends how long she's been down there extracting incomplete genomes. It wouldn't surprise me to find out she's been having Emix dispose of her failed experiments by fly-tipping. All that gunk out in the water is bound to have repercussions," she said, erratically pacing in front of Clara. "We need to find Persephone and take a look at those Glow samples she was going to show me this morning."

"We _need_ to stop those kids from accidentally blowing themselves up and starting a war," Clara countered.

"It'll be quicker to find Persephone and ask her for directions than wandering around the streets," said the Doctor. Clara didn't like it, but she had a point; they did not know where they were going, and Aegean-4 was very large and comprised mostly of maze-like slums and workers' lodgings. "If I remember correctly her surgery was to the _east_ , which is…" she turned around then pointed in a random direction, "That way. C'mon."

"You'd better be right," Clara warned, "If anything happens to those kids-"

"Coo, you worry too much. They're smarter than that. Didn't you go around protesting when you were their age?"

"Did I spend a few rainy days picketing outside sexual health clinics shouting homophobic slogans, you mean?" she jibed. The Doctor didn't say anything, only waited for her to answer the question genuinely. "I protested when they raised tuition fees. And went to Pride a few times. Can't say I was _too_ politically engaged until you regenerated and got all these _notions_ in your head." The Doctor laughed.

"Are my notions rubbing off on you?"

"I couldn't stand to be married to you if they hadn't. But what do you think about what they're doing?"

"Well, sometimes you have to make your voice heard," she said absently, glancing around to try and work out which way was right. Everything was identical. It was decrepit, damp, and covered in barnacles, advertisements and vending machines. Not to mention sick homeless people lolling about in the sea mist barely aware of their surroundings. Were they _all_ taking Glow?

"Reminds me of Blackpool here," said Clara.

"How so?"

"They're both shitholes with obnoxious towers in the middle of them," said Clara.

"And Brighton's not?" she countered, "You don't think the i360 is an obnoxious tower?"

"Well, that's the problem with England, really; always building bloody towers. Towers and wheels. God knows, I'm surprised Aegean-4 doesn't have a wheel."

"It might do, we haven't seen the whole city yet." Clara disagreed, she thought one street was representative enough of the whole city. It certainly didn't have the intrigue or the variety of Xetia, it was so manufactured and soulless. "When you think about it, the whole city is one big wheel. Kinda."

"How do you get that?"

"It's a circle."

"Okay… where did I put those cigarettes?" she said absently, searching the utility belt of the spacesuit.

"They're on the TARDIS, you didn't want them to get wet," said the Doctor. Clara grimaced; she wanted a smoke. Searching the pockets she found a crumpled packet of nicotine lozenges; they would have to do.

"Hey, um…" Clara began to ask a question, catching up to the Doctor who was walking fast and was a little ahead of her. The Doctor slowed to match Clara's pace when she began to talk. "Was that a popular opinion on Gallifrey? Like, disapproving of Time Lords and-"

"It's complicated," said the Doctor, interrupting her before she could quite finish. "It didn't really happen often enough for many people to have formulated an opinion. It's an isolated planet, and they didn't much like visitors. _She's_ an anomaly. But, well, you remember stories I've told you about Susan. She married a human centuries ago, just had to leave Gallifrey behind to do it. I guess I did the same thing."

"And what did you think of that? At the time?"

The Doctor stopped walking and faced Clara, smiling as she recalled the memory, "I locked her out."

"Sorry?"

"David was a freedom fighter when we met him, defending Earth against the Daleks. And boy, did she fall for him. But I knew she'd never have chosen to leave me, so I locked her out. Left her on Earth, so they could be together. I think they adopted some kids, in the end…" she trailed off. "I've been thinking about her a lot recently."

"Why don't you look for her?" Clara suggested, "If she's been on Earth all this time, she'll be around somewhere, won't she?"

"…We should find Persephone," she avoided the question. Clara doubted she had an answer she could give even if she wanted to. "Ah-ha! I said we weren't far." She pointed at the neon red cross hanging from the edge of a building. Clara barely recognised their surroundings.

"Are you sure we're in the right place?"

"Sure I'm sure, Coo." Clara was sceptical, but the Doctor walked right up to the door and knocked on it.

"I don't think you need to knock to go into a clinic," said Clara.

"Right," the Doctor nodded, "Where's the door handle?" Clara pointed at a hole in the wall right where a button to open the door should be; it looked as though the control panel had been ripped out. "Hm. That's a conundrum." But it wasn't down to them to figure it out; promptly, the door was opened from the inside, forcibly jimmied and then pushed.

"I'll give you a hand," Clara offered as Persephone appeared from the shadowy interior.

"It's fine, I can-" Clara waved her hand and a well-placed wave of telekinesis sent the door fully into the frame, juddering to a stop. "How did you do that?"

"I've got hidden talents," Clara smiled.

"I don't think we introduced ourselves properly earlier – I'm the Corsair," she continued with the alias, "This is Clara, my wife. And I think I've found the source of your mystery illness."

"Well, come in," Persephone stood aside and let them into the clinic. It was dark and dank and smelled like death, perhaps the least inviting medical facility Clara had ever visited – and she'd seen some doozies. "Sorry about the state of it in here, I can't get any contractors out to fix anything, and I don't have the money to get replacements of… well, anything. It's hard enough trying to keep things sterile."

"And you said you're the only medical professional here, in the whole city?"

"No, the Aegeans have their own doctor who lives up in the Lighthouse with them," said Persephone, stepping over discarded bandages, rusty instruments and stains that definitely looked like blood. "But nothing can entice them to come down here… I'll take that thermometer from you now, Mr Garrick." She had a patient, a middle-aged man sitting on the edge of the only bed in the room with a thermometer in his mouth. While she did that, the Doctor took it upon herself to investigate the clinic, searching for the Glow samples Persephone had promised to show them earlier. But then she spotted something else.

"Is that the hyperbaric chamber you were talking about?" the Doctor approached a big, person-sized cylinder pushed against the exterior wall and gathering dust. Persephone didn't respond, still dealing with Mr Garrick. Clara joined the Doctor as she pressed buttons on the control panel of the machine, but it wasn't responding. "It sure is busted. Do you want me to take a look at this thing for you?"

"Do you know much about machinery?"

"I know a lot of things about a lot of things," said the Doctor, "I think it's the circuitry."

"I know," said Persephone, "That's why I broke off the panel for the door, to see if I could use the wires."

"And?"

"And the panel is sitting right there. I don't know what to do with the parts. You've got a fever, Mr Garrick."

"What should I do?" Garrick asked Persephone.

"Can you run blood tests here?" the Doctor asked. She was kneeling in front of the hyperbaric chamber and trying to pull a panel off the front.

"Yes, just about, if the computer cooperates. Why?"

"What about dosimeter, do you have one of those?"

"What would I want a dosimeter for?"

The Doctor stood back up, leaving the chamber alone for the time being, "Could I see your Glow samples? I've got a theory."

"…Wait just a moment, Mr Garrick," she said, opening a drawer nearby and pulling out a test tube. Within was a powdery substance glowing vividly yellow. It struck Clara as eerily familiar, but she couldn't place it.

"Have you been able to analyse this yet?" the Doctor practically fell over herself in her hurry to get to the tube.

"No. I told you, I haven't got the equipment."

"Not to worry, I should be able to get to the bottom of this no problem," said the Doctor, uncorking the tube and dipping a finger in the powder.

"What are you doing? I don't think you should-" But Persephone could not prevent her from eating the powder.

"Just as I suspected. Plutonium-250."

"Oh my god!" Clara exclaimed. She had placed it. "I saw one of the divers with the Aegean brothers carrying a piece of coral that looked just like that earlier. When we saw them with the sqwill."

"I don't understand, what is it?" Persephone asked.

"There's a… someone down in Xetia conducting experiments," said the Doctor, "They're using isotopes to do something to fossils, but I think the waste is being unceremoniously dumped. It's irradiating the coral. The coral gets made into the Glow, and your people up here are all taking it and coming down with radiation sickness. Hence the funky symptoms."

"Someone's dumping radioactive waste?"

"They sure are."

"Didn't you try to stop them?"

"I've got a lot of plates spinning," said the Doctor, "Do you have any anti-rads? Access to anti-rads?"

"I've got a small supply. Not enough to treat everybody, and especially not if they keep taking the Glow."

"Well, if I were you, I'd give Mr Garrick here what he needs and then leave the rest with me. I'll make sure you get the medicine or the means to make more," said the Doctor. "Can I keep this?"

"I suppose." She pocketed the test tube.

"Now I'll fix the chamber," the Doctor smiled and went back to what she was doing. Persephone retrieved her remaining stash of anti-rads and gave them to Mr Garrick, who shuffled out of the clinic and the door that was now stuck open. This left Clara standing in the middle of the room like a gooseberry, unsure of where she was most useful. Probably at Milky Way Shakes.

"Do you have medical training?" Persephone asked her.

"I can do CPR," said Clara.

"So that's a no?"

"…Yes," she admitted.

"Do you know machines?"

"Not really."

"So, what is it you do?"

"Clara's a poet," said the Doctor from the other side of the room. "Sorry, Coo – do you prefer I introduce you as a poet or a teacher?"

"Teacher," said Clara truthfully. She used to introduce Clara as a poet for the most part before they moved to Earth.

"Clara's a teacher," the Doctor corrected herself, "Of literature."

"And does that come in handy?"

"You'd be surprised. Where's a good place to get a milkshake around here, anyway?"

"A milkshake?"

"Milky Way Shakes, where is it?" Clara reiterated.

"Just follow the ads north, they're the next best thing we have to signs."

"Do the streets not have names?" Thinking about it, Clara didn't think she'd seen a single street sign.

"They have numbers, it's a grid."

"It's like being back in New York," the Doctor quipped. "There's a solenoid out of whack. I should be able to replace this and get the thing working again. Good thinking ripping out the door panel."

"Do they sell medical supplies in any of the vending machines around here?" Clara asked, curious.

"Good question," the Doctor praised her as she sat back down on the floor with bits of the door panel in her lap.

"It's complicated," said Persephone.

"But this city is funded by those sponsors, right? The cigarettes, the milkshakes?" Clara implored, "Big Pharma not getting in on the action, sending drugs to the far reaches of the galaxy?"

"Technically, yes, that's how it's supposed to work," said Persephone, "In practice? Those vending machines haven't been restocked for months, even though deliveries are supposedly coming in. You want to know what I think?"

"Yes, I do," said Clara, leaning on a table that had more blood on it than she would like.

"They can't turn a profit with the vending machines because of all the pay cuts, so they're selling it on somewhere else."

"But they're still getting in? And the Lighthouse is still functioning as, well, a lighthouse?"

"Yes. We see the ships land."

"That's very interesting – isn't that interesting?" Clara called back to the Doctor, preoccupied with the machine, "Because everything we've heard from Xetia is that the radios aren't working. No off-world communications. But they must be working in order for ships to land at the spaceport, right?"

"I suppose so."

"And so that they can export all the electricity the city generates."

"I wouldn't know, sorry," Persephone sighed, "It's hard enough keeping track of what happens here, let alone in the Lighthouse or down in Xetia. _I_ can't go down there, I don't have a diving suit."

"Will the xetians not share medical supplies?" the Doctor asked, still vaguely listening. Clara heard the buzzing of the sonic screwdriver.

"Not without a new trade agreement, and the Aegeans won't arrange one. I'd smuggle, but I don't have the funds to pay, and I'm not about to start charging anybody for medical treatment."

"Good on you. You're the best kind of stubborn," said the Doctor.

"Who did you talk to when you went to Xetia?" Persephone decided she was going to ask some questions of her own.

"Their ambassador, Zono," said Clara, "Very afraid of causing a diplomatic incident."

"You only got here a few hours ago, and you've already met the xetian ambassador?"

"And the city's best doctor," said Clara.

"We only need to meet the Aegeans and we've got the whole set," quipped the Doctor. "I think I'm done here."

"Really? That quickly?" Persephone was incredulous, but the Doctor got to her feet and, lo and behold, got the hyperbaric chamber humming nicely when she switched it on.

"You really need a replacement, I'm not sure how long that solenoid will last, especially with 'the Blues' being so rife," said the Doctor.

"Easier said than done."

"I'll work on it. Trust me. You said Milky Way Shakes is north?"

"Well, yeah – are you leaving? I could use some help, and you're going to get milkshakes?"

"We have an appointment, it's not really about the shakes," said the Doctor, "You've been a big help, though. I'll see what I can do, maybe work out a deal with Xetia to get you medicine to distribute."

"I – well – thank you. Sorry I'm not more friendly."

"You're plenty friendly," said Clara, "We'll bring you a milkshake."

"Yes, a milkshake," the Doctor took Clara's hand as they headed towards the bar, "Give me a shout if you need anything else, I'll find a way to hear it."

"You're very strange, Corsair."

"Don't I know it! Bye now!" And they were back out in the wind and rain. Clara wondered if the weather was always so terrible on Xetos. "Y'know, I almost wish I _was_ called 'the Corsair', then we could be 'Clarsair.' Or 'Cora.' Both great couple names."

"I'm quite happy for us to be called 'the Oswalds,' like we are already. Because for some ungodly reason you decided to take my name."

"So!" the Doctor clapped her hands as an indication she was changing the subject, "What do we know?"

"We know the Aegeans' entourage are the ones collecting the coral from the city and presumably peddling it up here," said Clara, "We know the coral exists because of what the Rani's doing. We know the Aegeans can communicate off-world when nobody else can. We know that their punitive working conditions are to blame for outbreaks of decompression sickness _and_ radiation sickness from taking that drug."

"Systems, systems, systems…" the Doctor sighed, "Seems that you and I need to have a word with Blane and Pax. We can take the TARDIS right up to the Lighthouse when we're done with the milkshakes. Oh, and in future, you might want to be a _little_ bit subtler when you flirt with people in front of me."

"She's a _doctor_ , sweetheart," said Clara, "You know I can't resist a doctor."

"Don't I just," she smirked.

"She _is_ very pretty, though… and she's called _Persephone_. Goddess of Spring and the Underworld, I can't think of a better name for a medical professional. I should go back and get her number."

"Ha, ha…"

Milky Way Shakes wasn't what Clara had been expecting. She'd perhaps been envisioning a fancy, futuristic diner still retaining some hollow facsimile of the American Dream, only translated to outer space; it wouldn't be the first time they'd come across that kind of place, after all. There was an eatery just like that on the moon they sometimes visited. But Milky Way Shakes was not that. It was practically a shack. A metallic cubicle that looked more like a photo booth than a restaurant and had nothing inside but a big mixer churning pastel-coloured gunk around and a credit receptacle like the ones on the vending machines. It basically _was_ a vending machine, there wasn't even an attendant. If it wasn't for the enormous, holographic sign flickering above, she wasn't even sure she'd know what it was selling.

Gathered outside in a huddle were the kids they'd been sent to babysit; Clara let out a sigh of relief. They were still okay. The Doctor's detour to visit Persephone hadn't put anybody in danger.

"Fancy seeing you here!" the Doctor called loudly, startling them all. Nate was silent as always, but Sostan and Aio didn't look happy to see them.

"Did my mother send you?" asked Aio.

"Indeed, she did," said the Doctor, "Sorry about that. I hate to feel like a narc, but she's worried about you."

"She's worried about politics, that's all," said Aio. She was trying to sound like she didn't care, but Clara didn't buy it.

"You know that's not true," said Clara, "She doesn't want you getting tangled up in this mess."

"Isn't that our choice?" Sostan countered.

"Hm, it kind of _is_ their choice, Coo," said the Doctor.

"But Zono is more informed than you," said Clara.

"That's a good point, too," said the Doctor, flip-flopping.

"She doesn't know more than us just because she's older," said Alexa.

"Sometimes old people are wrong. I mean, just take a look at every US president, they were all wrong," said the Doctor.

"About what?" Clara frowned.

"Gee, I don't know – thinking that America is a legitimate nation and it isn't built on the un-seceded bones of the indigenous population?"

"Okay, I don't think we have time for this just now," said Clara.

"Listen, all I believe is that we should stick it to the man."

"Yeah," said Sostan, "And the man is this Milky Way Shakes stand."

"I doubt that," said Clara, "Milky Way Shakes won't even know you smashed up their stand, and all you'll do is get milkshake everywhere." She added to the Doctor, "Why are you encouraging them? You know this won't help, and _we_ can go see what's what with the Aegeans."

"How are you going to get an interview with the Aegeans?" asked Sostan.

"Same way we got into your secret lab. Improvising," said the Doctor. "I'll come up with something, I always do. But, listen, while I always support activism, I agree with Clara, I'm not sure breaking this will accomplish much. Aside from stopping people from having milkshakes for a while, which would kind of suck. I know that things are pretty terrible here for about a bajillion reasons, but let's not let the lack of milkshakes be one of them, okay?"

"Whose side are you on?" Sostan continued to challenge her, "You don't support activism. You don't want to help us, you just wanted to talk to the Doctor."

"Now, that's not true, I always want to help, and so does Zono. Bureaucracy is a cut-throat business, trust me. What are you really trying to gain, though? You had a bomb this morning, a black hole bomb. If that had worked, it wouldn't have just killed the Aegeans, it would have killed all of you and both of us. Now, I may have a lot of sympathy for your cause, but I can't abide by people being put in unnecessary danger, and especially not when my wife is among them." They said nothing. "Well? I'm waiting. What did you want to gain with the bomb? Lemme tell you, nobody's ever garnered sympathy for a cause with a bomb. At least, not a bomb that killed anybody. The suffragettes bombed a lot of post-boxes and even an empty house, but they didn't kill anybody."

"Milky Way Shakes can be our post-box."

"That's ridiculous, they were trying to cripple communications and make a real impact, you're not impacting anybody except this city's corporate sponsors who'll make a few credits less from a backwater store-front. And you know what'll happen if they kick up a fuss? The Aegeans will just pay them some hot cash to make it all blow over. _I'll ask you again_ : what were you hoping to gain with the singularity bomb?"

"People need to listen to us," said Sostan when nobody else volunteered an answer.

"And you think martyrdom will accomplish that? You think this is a problem that requires more martyrs, on top of all the sqwills, on top of all the humans who are dying up here because the Aegeans' corporate caveats mean they're all developing decompression sickness? You know the humans only have one hyperbaric chamber between them, and it was busted until about fifteen minutes ago when _I_ fixed it."

"You don't understand."

"No, I do understand, intimately. You're angry, and you've got a right to be – who _wouldn't_ be angry about all this? I sure am. Clara's seething, even if you can't tell," said the Doctor, indicating Clara at her side, "Murder is no way to enact change. Especially not when you threaten both Aegean-4 _and_ Xetia with your shenanigans. You think a black hole discriminates?"

"It's a micro black hole."

"Well, first of all, it's not any kind of black hole because the gizmo was broken. Second of all, a _micro_ black hole still has enough gravitational oomph to grind both cities to dust in a second. You don't even know how lucky you are that that thing didn't work," the Doctor went on, "I'm not asking you to make friends with the Aegeans, just trust _me_ that I care enough to go and put a stop to this."

"But you're just one person. Two, if she counts."

"Hey!" said Clara.

"She does count," said the Doctor, "And there are only four of you. You can't even wait a few hours to give us a chance? Leave your rampant destruction of property until tomorrow?"

"You don't understand," Nate spoke up, "My father died because of the changes to their rules - they worked him to death. You want me to forget about that? You tell me to go home, but I just go back to an empty hole. There's nothing here for me. But you can't get off-world anymore."

"Do you want me to take you somewhere? I can," the Doctor offered, "As soon as Clara and I are done, we can take you wherever you want to go, far away from Xetos."

"That's not the point."

"I'm sorry about what happened, but you have to believe me, I want justice as well. This isn't the way to get it. You're not even hitting them where it hurts, this is a milkshake stand for crying out loud. They might not even notice."

"Then we'll smash up every shop," said Sostan, "We'll break everything until they listen."

"But _you're_ not listening," the Doctor was getting frustrated, unable to talk them down, "This place is broken enough already. You're not helping anyone by doing this."

"Why do you care about the milkshakes so much?"

"I – this isn't about the milkshakes!"

"Then let us do what we came here to do."

"No! You'll get yourselves in trouble, and for nothing!"

"It's not nothing," Nate was upset.

"All I'm asking is that you give me a shot and trust that I care about this stuff too."

"You don't know anything," said Sostan, "You're not the Doctor. You didn't save us from invaders. _The Doctor_ gave me the bomb, and I trust her a whole lot more than I trust some pirate." With that, he pulled out a harpoon gun and shot it straight through the swirling mixers. They shattered and the mechanism began wildly throwing out globules of dairy everywhere, onto the grimy streets and a little onto their suits. It didn't take more than a few seconds for it to just about run out, then the machine sparked and there was a small explosion barely more exciting than a roman candle. It began to smoke softly.

"Well, great," said the Doctor, unamused, "Do you feel better now? Do you feel like you accomplished a lot?"

"Maybe if I could get in a room with the Aegeans so I could shoot one of them," said Sostan darkly.

"You don't mean that," said the Doctor.

"I do."

"You don't. You think killing someone is brave? It's not. It's the most cowardly thing you can do. And so is smashing up a damn milkshake stand. You want your mom to believe you're an adult? This isn't the way to go about it. God only knows what I'd tell my own daughter if she said she'd been practising direct action by busting open a glorified vending machine…"

"What would you tell her?" Clara asked.

"To get a life, or start a band. Why don't you four start a band? That's what kids usually do when they're full of pent-up emotions, isn't it?"

"They do a fair bit of vandalism, too," Clara pointed out, "But, no, the Corsair is right, this is very irresponsible and won't help your cause."

"We'll just have to break more stuff then, won't we?" said Sostan, talking a big game. But that was all he was doing.

Over the rain, they heard the approach of a whining siren. The Doctor didn't find it very intimidating, but the kids sure did.

"It's the feds," said Nate, "We have to get out of here."

"What? You won't even get arrested? Raise some publicity, stand up for what you're doing?" the Doctor challenged. But they were already fleeing, and they didn't have any respect for her with this identity. Perhaps if she confessed who she really was she could get them to listen, but it wasn't the time. They were already running for the edge of the city, Nate and Alexa scrambling to put the helmets of their diving suits back on. "I guess we'll take the heat!"

A buzzing sphere with a propeller sticking out of the top of it and a blue siren wailed and flashed on the bottom.

" _Cease and desist! Cease and desist!_ " it shouted at them in a shrill, robotic voice. The teenagers jumped right off the side of the city platform and into the water; there was no way the robot was going to follow them now.

"Alright already, we're desisting," said the Doctor to the little machine, which was barely bigger than a grapefruit. It stopped and hovered in front of them.

" _Destruction of corporate property is grounds to terminate employment_."

"Oh, we're not employees," she said.

" _Identify yourselves_."

"We're brand ambassadors, from a potential sponsor. We just smashed up this here milkshake stand to get a look at your response time if someone were to attack one of _our_ installations – and I gotta say, I'm not impressed. I'd like to talk to your manager."

" _What potential sponsor_?"

"You don't know? Gee, well, that explains why nobody was here to meet us," the Doctor added as an aside to Clara, "Can you believe the hospitality in this dump?"

"I really can't," said Clara, going along.

"We're from Coca-Cola. I'd appreciate if you could let Blane and Pax know we've arrived so we can meet with them about their shoddy security. You can be sure we won't be putting any Coke machines out here if you can't protect them." The robot shut off its lights and began to hum a little.

"What's it doing?" Clara asked quietly.

"Communicating," said the Doctor, "Announcing our arrival. I can't believe those kids wouldn't stick around to get arrested – wouldn't that give them street cred?"

"At least they're safe and nobody's been hurt, apart from Milky Way Shakes' off-world assets." The robot beeped.

" _Your arrival has been noted by Mr Harris Kober, who extends an invitation to the Lighthouse on behalf of Misters Aegean and Aegean. I will be your escort_."

"Glad to see they've finally come to their senses. Coca-Cola can do a lot for this wasteoid, it would be a shame to have that ruined by bad manners." The robot didn't move. "Well? Are you going to escort us or not?" It didn't speak again, turning around and whizzing away down the street, humming as it went. It waited for them at a crossroads in the slums. They began to follow.


End file.
